What time could it be? Why is everything so quiet? When is Agaat coming?
I wish I could have one last bath.
How distant they seem, the days when I could make my way to the bathroom on my own with my walking sticks.
Agaat has abandoned the great ablutions. She still appears with a tub full of steaming hot water, but it’s only a gesture.
I hear six strokes. Is it evening? Or morning?
She’ll be here any moment now with her fragrant waters. She’ll dip the cloth in it. She’ll wring it quite dry, she’ll leave it over my face to steam. Then she’ll dip her small hand in the water and dab me with it till my whole body is full of cool wet patches.
Often I wake up only when she’s already doing it. Touching me with water. She gets to every part of me but I’m no longer invaded or besieged.
It feels as if she’s embalming me.
Small baptism she calls it.
She doesn’t say it out loud. I read it in her eyes. She makes sure that I can see, she uncovers my patched eye when she’s working on my body, so that I can see what’s happening, so that I shouldn’t get a fright. She keeps me going with our eye game. One-eye game it is now, because the other one has fallen shut. She sees to it that my mind stays active, all the time I must interpret, she knows when it’s too difficult, then she gives me audible clues.
Listen to the knocking, children, she sings when she auscultates me lightly, more to keep me alive than to get rid of the phlegm, it feels.
Perhaps I may yet get to see Jakkie.
Have we bought him a Christmas present?
I can’t remember.
And what will Agaat think up for me for Christmas? Would she think of asking me? She’ll press her finger on her help list. Tattered, worn it hangs there on the wall. I hope, I fear, I wish . . .
I wish I could bath.
Would I get it spelt out still? B·A·T·H? Request an immersion?
It’s easier than P·R·A·Y.
The caress of hot water, the tingling. How I long for it! In the contracting circle of delight it was a last small treat. The sensation of weightlessness, of being immersed.
I could imagine that I was lying motionless in the bath just as always, before I got sick. With foam or oils or bath salts. Or mustard after a hard day’s work.
Agaat always gave me a full hour for that invalid’s bath, just came and added hot water every now and again. Saw to it that I didn’t slide down, pulled the little rubber mat under me back a bit, put a bathing cap on my head so that my hair shouldn’t get wet.
Usually the bath included a hairwash. I could lie back completely and almost float, with her strong arm under me, and the small mouse-paw with the fused fingers tilting my head back in the water to massage my scalp.
So pleasurable, the floating feeling, with my neck free of the chafing neckbrace.
It made me smile.
I could still smile then.
That’s what it would be like, I thought then of death, a floating away on a lukewarm pond amongst bulrushes.
Once I looked up at her and saw we were thinking the same thought.
Or I thought it was the same.
I wanted to say something about it. I wanted to whisper, it is good. That we think it, that we dream it.
I could produce only a groan.
Don’t fret, Ounooi, Agaat said, don’t be scared, I’m holding you.
Had she misunderstood me?
Not that she always wanted to help me.
She often looked on passively at my struggle to get to the bathroom. It was the last of my exertions. I could exert myself.
Perhaps she thought it was good exercise.
If I wanted to bath at seven o’clock it took me ten minutes to the bathroom with the Viking Strider. With the four-prong stick, six months later, it already took much longer. The walking frame in the end meant half an hour of wrestling. When I started preparing myself and the first stumbling sounded on the floorboards, Agaat started singing Onward Christian Soldiers.
She didn’t always feel like bathing me. She hoped that I’d give up halfway and hobble back to my room. The points of the walking sticks, the stilts and castors of the walking frame all kept snagging on everything. It exhausted me, the bumping and the getting stuck, the manoeuvring around corners.
The bathroom door was the last door that she’d unscrewed, as if there she’d wanted to retain a barricade to the very last.
Against my nakedness, I thought.
How did she think she was going to avert it all?
Keep nicely to the middle, or watch out for the telephone stool, Agaat called from the kitchen. And a while later, as if she didn’t know exactly how I was getting on: Where have you got to now, Ounooi? Passage cupboard? Spare room? Growth rate?
As if I could shout a reply.
The ‘growth rate’, the pencil marks just before the bathroom next to the door frame of the children’s room. There where Agaat made Jakkie stand every August and with a pencil marked above his head how tall he was. Would it still be there? Or would she have scrubbed it off in the great scrub-lust that took hold of her when we’d cleared up the house? Scrub-lust and paint-lust. Sanitised for my sake.
Two rows of marks. The other was past the bathroom over the passage threshold, where the ceiling became lower, at the end of the passage, there where the light cast only a dim glow.
You could see it properly only when the light of the back room itself was on.
But nobody ever switched on a light there any more.
The door was shut.
No need to unscrew it either.
Nobody ever ventured there any more.
At one stage I used the closed door at the end of the passage as a lever. To help me negotiate the turn to the right at the bathroom door.
Then I focused on the copper letter-slot in the door.
Exactly at eye level.
It worked on me like a ray of fire.
It motivated my lame body. Eventually I had to turn my head away, and then my body, with a great lifting of one side of the walking frame, more than I had to lift it simply to move forward one pace with my dangling feet. I had to swing the frame through the air, at least a quarter of a turn, to position myself to enter by the bathroom door.
With the neckbrace I could no longer look back, but I knew that Agaat was leaning backwards on the kitchen table to look down the passage.
That’s what she always did when I moved anywhere during that time.
I could feel what she was thinking.
When I’d almost made my way through the bathroom door, she came down the passage to the tune of Oh ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road. And brushed past me through the doorway to run the water. And then past me again to fetch the towels.
When the water was running, I had to see to it that I got myself into the bathroom in time because I had to ring the bell around my neck to signal that the bath was full. The bell that she’d hung there with the words: Give the cow a bell to keep her out of the ditch.
I had to lift one arm from the walking frame, or detach it from the elbow support, to ring the bell. One, two tinkles I could manage.
If the copper letter-slot caught my eye, if I stood there for too long facing the dead door before I could manage the great about-turn, Agaat marched past behind me, furious, on her heels, and opened the bath taps all the way and went out by the back door with a slamming of the screen door and stayed away as long as was necessary to create a situation.
A few times the bathtub overflowed, all over the bathroom floor and down the passage, and when at last I could turn away, the feet of the walking frame splashed in the water so that I lost my balance.
Twice I fell.
To the ringing of bells.
Both times she scolded me terribly.
Now see how everything’s flooded here! You’ll break a hip and then what are we going to do? It’s because you stand there like a lizard staring at the sun, what for? There’s nothing to be seen there. It’s the end of the road.
On such evenings she brought the wheelchair and pushed me shhhirrr, through the water back to my room and left me right there while she mopped up the passage.
The bath I could write off.
The most difficult in the end was getting me into the tub itself.
With the new automatic wheelchair IBot, July 1995 I got it, the trip from my room to the bathroom took less than two minutes, but eventually it became impossible for Agaat to get me out of the chair onto the side of the bath. My back was too limp, I could no longer be of any use with the holding or supporting. Only in one arm did I still have a little bit of grip.
Well, then I’ll just have to piggy-back you, Agaat said, and crouched in front of the wheelchair.
I remember the evening, I was naked already on the leather seat, she’d taken off my white nightgown over my head, she’d removed my neckbrace so that my head lolled on my chest. Surrounded by the shiny black levers and control knobs and gear sticks I looked to myself like a rag doll, the chair like a rampant animal.
Willy-nilly I had to gaze at my own lap, at the meagre little tuft of hair there. I couldn’t lift my head to avert my eyes.
Come on, press the forward tilt button and then you let yourself slide down onto my back. Hook that one little-bit-of-an-arm around my neck, I’m waiting!
Her voice sounded as if she were saying: Come, come, switch off the winch-axle, hook on the shallow-tooth harrow, or, get the mowing-snaffle into her mouth.
Farming as usual.
I groaned to signify, perhaps we should just give it up. In front of me the big white cross looked like a traffic sign.
Quarantine.
Beware.
Cripples crossing.
To the pool of healing? No, a fantasy of flight.
Agaat’s arms were extended backwards to catch hold of me, the thin one and the thick in the black sleeves of the housedress, the cuffs white wing-tips. Her head was held high, the back of the cap peaked in the air, a crane taking off.
Press on the knob! Agaat called. Who dares, wins!
What next then once I’m on your back? I groaned, are you going to chuck me off with a hup from one shoulder like a sack into the water?
I wouldn’t have groaned if I’d thought I could utter intelligible words, but an emotion I could then still express with my sounds.
I looked at the tub full of water. I saw it suddenly, in a flash, Agaat, the moment that she feels my full weight on her, jerking up her shoulder sideways and throwing me, against the wall, so that I fall down into the bath, a red veil in the water, bubbles.
Domestic help and nurse of years’ standing maintains it was an accident.
What are you hanging there betwixt heaven and earth for, Ounooi? Are you seeing ghosts again? she said. Come now, I can’t spend the rest of my life squatting here on my haunches. Giddy up! I have a horse and a shiny dappled horse!
A fantasy of horse-riding.
Elevated Forward Slow Tilt. One finger can still find the little icon on the control panel. The IBot zoomed and reared up and whooshed. Agaat lifted her hindquarters to get to the right height to catch hold of me. The apron’s bow around her middle a sharp white lily on a pool.
And I’m coming to fetch you yet, she sang.
My buttocks were sticking to the leather seat. She got hold of me by my thighs on both sides and pulled me off onto her back. Hup! she shook me up onto her back. My arms a slack harness on both sides of her head. Hup! over her hips, astride.
Oh, I have a horse!
Tighten your arms around my neck!
My head fell forward on her shoulder. Her hair against my cheek. Always softer than I thought. Her neck. The nine-star. The sinews as she strained. Lifebuoy. Mum. Whaleback. White crest on the forehead.
And then she came upright. Her strong hand under my buttocks so that I couldn’t slide off her. Her clothes against my stomach and breast hard and coarse before I could feel the warmth of her body.
On my horse my shiny dappled ho-o-o-rse, with a brand-new saddle ’n bit! How now, she asked softly on the in-breath.
Had she cursed?
There was something by which I could feel the decision.
A ridge that gathered in the cloth of her dress.
And then something beyond the ridge, a boundary, a step, right through herself.
Then she got into the bath with me.
Shoes and all.
Squats with me lower and lower, arranges my legs on either side of her until we both can sit, with a plash, a splash, her dress a bladder of air around her, a black rampart against my stomach, the black blacker yet as far as the water is sucked up her back, the white bow wilted.
I could still hear the tap, plink-plink, in the water, could hear the bluegums siffling through the chink of the bathroom window, a plover flying up, the dog nosing its dish over the cement of the backyard.
How long did we sit like that? I felt her breath against me, a support under mine. Deep breaths with intervals between.
I must have fallen asleep like that with my head against her back.
I woke up when she opened the tap to add hot water. She stirred it with her hands on both sides to distribute it, closed the tap, still remained sitting like that. The grandfather clock chimed. Quarter past eight. My time expired.
Then she straightened her legs and pushed back so that I could lean against the back of the tub. And she got up, with the dress clinging to her lower body. She pulled it away from her legs but the heavy cloth clung again, her thighs like two tree trunks.
Dripping out of the bath.
Sit just like that and don’t go to sleep again I’m coming now, she signalled with her eyes. Without twitching a muscle. As if she got into the bath with me fully-clothed every day.
Schlup-thud, schlup-thump, slowly down the passage in the wet shoes.
Never have I heard her walk so slowly. Never so heavily, a horse under a coat marching two legs to a side through a drift, hearse and drummer following.
But that was my mother’s funeral, her theatrical directions.
What will mine be like?
It’s in Agaat’s hands.
Does one wash a body before laying it out? With soap? With carbolic?
Agaat will wash me, I’m sure, pure I shall meet my Maker, whiter than snow before she crosses my hands for me.
Will she be able to resist straightening my fingers?
Perhaps she’ll splint my hands.
Perhaps she’ll break my fingers.
What will it be like when the funeral eaters have left?
I see her standing at the gate when the last guests have left, when Jakkie’s gone back to Canada. The gate will hold her, its silver inner cross, the tensed wires and the pipes of which it’s constructed.
She won’t be able to turn back immediately.
She’ll feel the hasp with the fingertips of the little hand, even though she knows it’s in place, feel the black iron ring, the double wire hook over which it slides. Her other hand, the strong one, will enclose the upper pipe, let go and grasp again so that the knuckles show white.
It won’t be the first time. So she stood every day when Jakkie went to school by bus, and every time after that when he went away after weekends or holidays. Then I had to go and fetch her there, or call her back from the stoep.
Come, Agaat, we must go and pull potatoes! Come, we must go and plait onions, come, the hanslammers are bleating for their bottles!
Come, little Agaat, we have to slaughter your last hanslam and the ear you may keep this time.
She’ll stand there and nobody will call her.
The dogs will sniff at her hems. They’ll press their wet muzzles into the backs of her legs. Jump up against her so that she’d be thrown slightly off balance.
Come, Agaat, whatever are you standing like that for.
The gate of Grootmoedersdrift. Yard gate.
Gate of Agaat’s world.
She’ll lift the black iron ring of the hook and then let it drop back.
The gate is closed, the road is white, the way is back and forward. And even further back to its undiscoverable beginning.
When she lets go of the iron ring, she’ll bring both hands to her head. She’ll press her cap closer to her head.
I’ll be there, Agaat. For a moment there’ll be a smell of fennel. I’ll touch the white embroidered edge of your cap with new fingertips. Just so that you’ll wonder, along the rippling of your gills: What Christmas breeze now?
And I tell you: To notice a breeze there where you’re standing will be a new beginning, a fern-tip of courage, a thimbleful.
But what will I be able to do about the motherless dust, about the empty road beyond the gate, the barren summered world around Grootmoedersdrift, the white heat, the ashen fallow-fields, the sheep with their snouts on the scale, their lips scavenging for the dry pods of vetch? What would I be able to do about the dry little pit-dams, the black shadows of bluegums, what about the white eviscerate boulders on the Heidelberg plain, the black rocks in the Korenland River?
It will feel too large and lonely for you. You will step back from the gate. You will turn round. The yard, the house, will feel too small. Small and deserted and inexorable. You will want to shut your eyes. You will open them again. You will want to crawl into your hearth. You will crawl out again. You won’t know what you’re about. You’ll go round the back, past the sheds to the backyard. Your feet won’t feel as if they belong to you, your steps will feel too long, your legs too loose. The milk-can there next to the screen door will seem to you like a thing you’ve never known. You will lift its lid by the chain and let go of it again. You will push open the door of the little creamery. The smell will drain you of your strength. With the front end of your cap against the separator’s cool shiny chrome you will stand for a while. Blindly you’ll feel for the handle and start turning till the high keening sound is released and you feel the vibration against your forehead.
Oh, my little Agaat, my child that I pushed away from me, my child that I forsook after I’d appropriated her, that I caught without capturing her, that I locked up before I’d unlocked her!
Why did I not keep you as I found you? What made me abduct you over the pass? What made me steal you from beyond the rugged mountains? Why can I only now be with you like this, in a fantasy of my own death?
Why only now love you with this inexpressible regret?
And how must I let you know this?
See, in the twilight I lead a cow before you, a gentle Jersey cow, the colour of caramel, the colour of burnt sugar, she smells of straw and a cud of lucerne. I place your hands on her nose, your palm on her lips. You are the eye-reader. There it is, bucketfuls of mercy in those defenceless pupils. I bring you in the vlei to the whitest arum lily rolled up. Take it by its ragged edge and whistle. It will open as the poet says with starlight in its throat. Here a bokmakierie hiccoughs in the wild mallow, all love contained therein, too much to endure. Just smell the buchu, and imagine the soft wet winter that will once more penetrate the soil. Let yourself be consoled, Agaat, now that language has forsaken me and one eye has fallen shut and the other stares unblinkingly, now I find this longing in my heart to console you, in anticipation, for the hereafter.
Am I vain in thinking you will miss me? That you will long to look after me, to wash me and doctor me and dress me in my bed, your last doll with whom you had to play for four years? Who is consoled by the thought that you will long for me as I was at the very end? Which me, which one of my voices will you want to commemorate? Look well, listen well, you will know when I depart. If you are sleeping, you will be woken up by it.
Who is it that clasps the irons of the gate for one last time, that lifts the ring to go out? Who hesitates there by the bars of the cattle grid, who inclines the neck slowly there where the noonday sun falls between the rails? What hoofs are these that cautiously start stepping over the obstacle? Is it a fluttering of any significance?
Are you going to hand me your starched cap to hold for a moment before you take it back again, you who remain behind?
…
They shut your mouth for you, Jak and Agaat. From that night that you fell into the ditch onto the rotten cow. And by the autumn of the following year they’d started collaborating on planning Jakkie’s birthday feast. A farewell birthday.
You gathered that he’d had his fill of the Defence Force, he was considering a career as a civilian pilot, but first he had to serve out his contract. Agaat knew more, you could see it on her face.
You wrote to Jakkie asking him who all you should invite. Somewhat abruptly he replied: Invite who you want to.
You were affronted. Don’t be so ungrateful, Jakkie, you told him on the telephone, all we’re trying to do is arrange something pleasant for you.
Then he sent a list: Gaf’s Jurie, Lieb’s Hugo, Flip’s Erik.
Jak took out his disappointment on you. He threatened Jakkie with his inheritance to make him stay on in the Air Force. That you picked up a few times when he was talking to him on the telephone.
In the evenings after supper Jak recalled Agaat from the kitchen. She had to present her planning for the feast to him. Ostentatiously spiteful pleasure Agaat derived from this. She ignored you. And Jak ignored you. Mockingly they imitated your style of entertaining to the last detail.
The flower garden must look its best, Jak said, as if he’d ever felt anything for the garden.
With red felt-tipped markers they ticked off on their lists every task completed, a mimicry of your method of doing.
You lost your appetite during this time, mostly stayed in your room, listened to Agaat regulating the movements on the yard and in the house. Your house was filled with a clattering and a shifting and a bumping, creaking floorboards, the chirring of newspaper on the window panes, incessant footsteps, sweeping and scrubbing, the clipping of sheep-shears in the garden. You plugged your ears with cotton wool and Vaseline.
In the evening you took your place at the table when Agaat rang the bell. She avoided your eyes, carried her perfect meals to the table, filled your plates and remained standing mutely behind your chairs. You scrabbled around in the food with your fork. Little Miss Muffet is stuffed, Jak would say, stuffed with her pills and her tears. As a reprimand he would hold out his plate with a large gesture for a second helping.
Agaat was imperturbable, you can still see her, how she places herself before the table to dish up for him, her hands in the air, her face in the shadow of the lampshade. You were hypnotised by the wrists in the starched white cuffs, the strong hand carving with the knife, the weak hand, deep in its sleeve, supporting the meat platter, nudging closer the gravy boat. You couldn’t look away from Agaat’s hands, the doing-hand and the helping-hand, the white and the black and the brown of Agaat’s arms and hands under the bright light on the spotless damask. She never put a finger wrong.
Jak drank a lot at supper. A renewed kind of garrulousness was generated by this. No longer furious, no longer passionate, but bitter, and cynical, and despairing.
The baas of Grootmoedersdrift, he would say, with his glass in the air, drinks to Agaat.
Later you came to know his refrain.
All hail the skivvy! The baas prefers the tyranny at one remove!
Keep my glass filled, Agaat, he said, but keep your madam sober, it’s her fate not to be allowed to carouse with her subjects.
And for Agaat our most total of teetotallers, Jak often said, her I shall keep topping up with words until one day she erupts in eloquence, pissed with wisdom. That’s what always happens to those who know and don’t say!
Agaat smirked when he talked like that.
What was to happen to you all? Something inexorable was hanging over you. The law and the prophets was the phrase haunting your mind all the time. But by that stage you’d long since given up reading the Bible.
Even for that Agaat made up. Her latest was that in the evenings she commandeered all the labourers, no, everybody in the huts, big and small, to the backyard for scripture and prayers. A kind of revivalist sermon she delivered there to them every evening, on the pattern of the broadcast services on the radio, filled with invocations of the fatherland and exorcisms of the enemy. A plot it was, you knew, she wasn’t really a believer, she just knew how it worked. She wanted their co-operation for the preparation for the feast. After the sermon there was of course vetkoek, soup, cinnamon porridge. She nagged at Jak to pour the tots with a heavier hand at knocking-off time so that they should be warmly receptive to the gospel by the time they gathered in the backyard.
During the day she drove them, along with the extra labourers, men and women that Jak had allocated to her and paid to beautify the garden for the feast.
Single-handedly he transported everything she needed by lorry: soil, bark and straw for the rose gardens, fertiliser and new trees and shrubs. He went to Cape Town and bought dozens of garden torches and lanterns. He ordered a marquee tent with smart wrought-iron tables and chairs from a hiring-supply company and had wood chopped and dry-piled and had new spits welded and new braai areas built.
For the guests who’d be staying over, he hired luxury sleeping-tents with mosquito netting and bathrooms, even built a sauna down by the dam.
Jak helped Agaat like a diligent labourer. He cast himself as her foreman. His irony was bitter and full of loathing, his obedience a grotesque display directed at you. You saw the labourers laugh when Jak trotted off to execute Agaat’s instructions.
She accompanied Jak to the lands to select and brand the slaughter-animals and he went and assembled extra slaughter-staff and kitchen help for the feast according to her specifications. They had the outbuildings painted and the yard tidied up.
Jak had a landing strip graded. He would rent a two-seater plane so that Jakkie could treat his friends to pleasure flips during the festivities.
He made a feint of reporting the progress with the preparations to you in the evenings, while Agaat stood by taciturn. The drunker he got, the more he wanted Agaat to play along.
Didn’t he realise that Agaat was playing her own game with you?
She said not a word.
If then at length he lost his temper, he inveighed against both of you.
Ag, how stupid of me to think that the slave-girl could ever really take the master’s part! After all, the slave-girl is in thrall to the mistress. They’re you might say each other’s extension cord. Closed circuit.
Did Jak himself understand that much about everything? At times you got that impression, as on the evening when he filled three glasses with wine and took sips from all three, kept decanting wine from one to the other.
Come Milla, he said, don’t you think it’s time for a little poem? What’s that one that you were always so fond of quoting to me? Love is the empty glass. And then? Bitter? Dark? That holds the hollow heart? Is that how it goes?
But then, you’re Siamese twins, aren’t you, you two, can’t the two of you recite it for me? Isn’t that how your joint unholy history started? With your nonsense-rhymes, not so? There was a woolly, wonderfully, with a paw, like a claw.
Jak knocked over the gravy boat.
Agaat cleaned up without twitching a muscle, as if these were gestures and a text that she knew. As if Jak were an actor whose words she was rehearsing with him to check that he was word-perfect.
How does the rest of it go, Agaat? Don’t you remember it any more, your good Afrikaner education? Jak asked. Agaat just looked at him, the cloth with which she was mopping up the gravy in her hand.
Yes, Gaat, what are you staring at me like that for? Or are you perhaps drinking in my every word? But your mouth is zipped up of course! Talking is the baas’s responsibility high and dry here on his little box. You and your miesies, you can put on the nappy and cook the pumpkin and cut the roup from a chicken’s tongue, but when it’s a matter of judgement and interpretation then you’re mute, the two of you. Not that you ever shut up, oh, no, it’s an eternal chattering. Ad nauseam. About what? About nothing I’m telling you. Tra-lee tra-la. But if the shit hits the fan, he who’s the baas gets to clean the fan. He must start up the whole shit-story here and explain the parable. You can lay nothing but wind-eggs, you and Madame Butterfly here.
Jak peered at you, his gaze unsteady with alcohol. Or what am I talking? MiIla my pilla oh so silla? Are you also saying nothing tonight?
You didn’t look up. Jak got up unsteadily from his chair and struck his breast.
It’s my tragedy this, Agaat. You’re standing there with your lip latched to your chin because you know, don’t you, that your history has already been written up for you, day and date. Who would ever think of one day telling my tale? It wouldn’t be for the mass market.
You two, you are the trashy novel, ladies’ fiction for the airport.
The women of Grootmoedersdrift!
Agaat Lourier and Milla Redelinghuys, a tale that will rend the heart of every mother! Deep, I tell you! The stone and the bat! The silenced minority, the last domestic trench, the aborted revolution, now on the shelves for the first time! Mother Smother and Maid Overpaid!
That evening late you went to sit in the garden. You wanted to think, you couldn’t understand what point it was that Jak was trying to make, whether he had a point. It must have been very late when you got up from the garden bench, a clear night, Orion had shifted across to the west already. The plovers called out in overflight, a broken scale, two notes, three notes, four. It was Easter and you could hear the new lambs bleating on the hills beyond the drift.
You wanted to go to your room through the stoep door. Jak’s light was on. You heard movement, a sound, you went back down the stairs and went and stood on a terrace further on and higher up from where you could see into his office. Just the central rod, the upper halves of the weights, as he lifted them, were visible for a moment, then they disappeared, jerkily, dangerously fast.
You climbed onto the stump of the cut-down fig tree under his window. His face was upside down. At this angle it looked like a mask. He was naked except for a truss of synthetic material around his waist. His chest was heaving, the sinews in his neck thin with straining, the muscles in his upper arms quivering. The weights were clearly too heavy. Between the grunts you heard other sounds. Only then could you make out the expression on his face. Tears down his cheeks. Bubbles of mucus under his nose.
You wanted to go in to him. I am part of this pain, you wanted to say to him, but you couldn’t. You leant your head against the window sill and listened till the sobs died down.
When it was still, you looked again. He was curled up there on the carpet. Around him the shiny rods and the round iron disks were scattered. His arms were around his head. There was a moth around the light, large loose shadows flapped in the room. From the gleam of the red midriff support you could see his breathing. He wasn’t sleeping. His jaws were moving as he muttered.
Jak’s tale.
Agaat’s tale.
Selvage and face.
You had eavesdropped on them both. The tales that were clenched back behind jawbones, those that were roared into the wind, into the reeds, into the blowing bluegum tatters, those that were broadcast through the chimneys, those that were distilled from the depths of the bottle, those that were declaimed on the dust roads of the dryland, those that were muttered into mouthpieces.
Was there somebody on the other side that day when you heard Agaat talking on the phone? Or had it been designed specially for your ears? How could you know? You had been her teacher.
You were standing behind the door in the kitchen where you knew she often stood listening when you were talking on the phone.
Yes, Jakkie, Agaat was saying, that’s not news to me, you know, I know, everybody knows your mother and your father, they’re not easy people, but we all have our faults. And they’ll always be your mother and your father.
No, I’m not defending them, I’m just saying.
Stop it, what do you want me to say? They’ve always been nothing but good to me.
What do you mean? I have food, I have clothes, I have a house . . . and everything . . .
No, you can’t say that, no you can’t.
Jakkie, stop it, your father would never say anything like that. You’re making it up because you’re very angry with him.
No, Jakkie, they look after me and they’re my people.
No, I’m not hiding it, why would I now stand here and lie to you?
Your mother has a hard time with him, he’s difficult, but she’s also difficult.
No, Jakkie, it’s not that bad either.
No, I don’t know what he said to you and I don’t want to know, if he has a complaint, he can tell me about it himself.
No, I don’t interfere.
No, that’s their business.
No, I’m not playing dumb. And I’m not playing innocent.
That’s not true. I know everything and see everything.
No, I say nothing to nobody. Why should I? They don’t do me any harm.
No, you don’t know what you’re saying.
Never mind. Never you mind now, Boetie, why are you so obstreperous this morning?
Of course I want you to stay!
Of course! You’re my brother. You’re the only little brother I have.
No, you needn’t worry about me, I can look after myself.
I’ll miss you, yes, more even than I miss you already.
Of course I’ll write. I’ll write even more.
I will, every week.
About the clover.
About the rain too.
About the drift, everything.
I will.
About the wind.
About the smell of my fennel, they say it’s sprung up all the way to Mossel Bay!
I’ll give you seeds to take along.
Of course I love you, terribly much, you don’t know how much.
No, you don’t know, you can’t know. You’re my child too, you know that, don’t you? But first come to have your birthday with Gaat. I’m making everything that you like. For one last time. Your sheep’s neck and sweet pumpkin, your lovely chicken pie.
No, you can’t possibly want to pull out now.
No, it’s all been arranged, Jakkie!
No, it would break my heart, listen to me!
No, go on, come now. Your mother and I are gardening for you for August.
Sowed yes. Namaqualand daisies. Bokbaai vygies. Your father’s even rented an aeroplane for you.
Never! Oh no! Just forget it!
No, I’d be far too scared.
No, I’ll never. Not a damn. Over the Kapokberg? Oh heavens no, Jakkie.
Over the plain? To the rivermouth?
No! Not why not, just not.
The y of the why and the double-u of the trouble-you.
Yes, Boetie.
The tip of the fern.
Never mind now, I know it’s hard.
Yes, I know you must. You must talk, yes. I want to hear it all.
No, I won’t shut my ears to it, I’m not stupid, I know what I know.
I read the papers, yes, I hear what they say.
Yes, Jakkie, don’t cry, come, hush, hush, don’t cry any more, I know it’s hard, I understand, you’re angry.
No, I won’t and I don’t want to.
It’s not my place, that’s why.
No, that’s not true, I do have a place.
No, Jakkie, don’t carry on like that. So what do you want me to do then?
I’ll never leave her alone. She needs me. I have an obligation.
Are you starting that again? You came along and found me here when you came to your senses and that’s that.
No, I don’t want to.
Where would I have to go? Who would want me . . . as . . . as I am?
No, Boetie, you know that’s not what I’m talking about.
No, Boetie, not yet now, perhaps one day. When I’m old one day, when I’m grey.
I will, I promise. Everything I’ll tell you, one day.
No, Jakkie, that’s right, you must do as your heart tells you to.
I’ll take care, whatever happens. You know I will.
Well, they take care of me too. I’d honestly not be suited to any other place. I don’t have a choice.
Then that’s the way it is.
So then they have only me. It’s better than nothing. And so then I only have them. That’s also better than nothing.
Yes, you will be happy, of course you will.
Don’t say never, Jakkie, that girl was just not your sort, that’s all.
No, I know, the young fellows too, unpolished as your mother would say, whoever would want to eat sheep’s head and drink vaaljapie with them?
No, you’ll find someone, you’re such a handsome chap, and so learned, a chip off the old block.
Yes I will. I always think of you. I pray for you.
No, Jakkie, you mustn’t talk like that.
No, go and read your Bible like a good boy. To every thing there’s a season, a time to stay and a time to go. In Ecclesiastes, you go and read it, it will comfort you.
Do you still have your bookmark?
The one I sent with your mother when you got your medal? In a white envelope?
Oh well, then I don’t know, I’ll just have to make you another.
If I was there? No, but they told me it was a very swanky affair, only your mother’s new shoes hurt her.
No, I’ll ask her about the bookmark. You must bring along your cross of honour so that I can see it, your father says it’s eighteen carat gold.
Then you could stand it no longer. You emerged from behind the door.
Agaat held the receiver away from her ear, glared at you.
You wanted to take the receiver from her hand. Without a goodbye she got up off the stool and smoothed her apron. You grabbed at the telephone in her hand. Agaat let go, the receiver swung against the wall. When you got hold of it at last, there was only a dialling tone.
You followed her to the kitchen, grabbed her by the front of her dress and shook her back and forth.
Who are you? How many thousands of devils are you? For what do you pretend to be a holy angel of light? Dear, good Agaat of Grootmoedersdrift who doesn’t grumble and doesn’t grouse no matter what! Who’ll take care, who knows her place, who doesn’t interfere! Who’s only too grateful! Who’s so very religious! Who are you trying to bamboozle? You’re a Satan! It’s my child! Mine! Mine! Do you hear me! So why don’t you just tell him what’s happening here? Or do you want to entice him away further and further? With your milksop of mealy-mouthed flattery? Is that your plan? He knows you’re lying! He knows! He knows! You think up a different story for each of us here according to your convenience. Witch! You’re a witch and you’re witching us here! If I’d only known, if I could only have known what I was doing that day when I took you in here. A curse you are. I hate you.
You struck her through the face. You remember your hands plucking at the collar of the uniform, a button popping, your fists hammering, on her breast, on her shoulders.
She stood stock-still absorbing the blows without moving a muscle, without retreating by a single step, without any retort.
Until you lowered your hands and averted your face.
You sank into a chair, with your head on your hands on the kitchen table. A whimpering came from you. You couldn’t stop moaning. Vaguely you were aware of movements, a kettle being filled, cups rattling, water starting to boil.
There was only the sound of rubber soles on the linoleum, then the smell of tea before your nose. You lifted your head. Agaat’s strong hand was adding sugar to the cup. One, two, and a little bit more. With great assurance. Sweeter than you ever took it. She stirred it. There was something specific about the stirring. It wasn’t impatient and it wasn’t fast. It was businesslike. It was reassuring. Did that signify peace? The teaspoon was back in the saucer.
Then, from the fingertips of the small hand, two disprins.
And then she was out by the back door.
There was a rumbling in the yard of the lorry delivering the marquee tent and the clanking of poles and ropes and pegs being unloaded.
And amongst the male voices, Agaat’s voice issuing orders:
Put it here! Here! Put it up, there!
Her voice warning. Not through my flowerbeds! Careful with the little trees, their tips! It’s their growth points! If you injure one of them!
Her voice threatening: That one, he’ll get the horsewhip!
You were shaky for days after the falling-out. Migraine, a pressure on the chest, a muscle twitching in your eye.
Agaat carried peppermint extracts to your darkened bedroom, cloths with mustard for your headache, eucalyptus extract for steaming over a bowl of boiling water.
For days after the incident she herself looked a shade greyer of face. Her cap was wilted as if she’d lost her knack with the starching and the ironing.
It would be fatal not to seek reconciliation. And you were the one most deeply in the wrong, you had most to be forgiven for.
She had you exactly where she wanted you.
She desired more than just a functional settlement, she wanted you just right for the feast. Cheerful, gentle. For Jakkie’s sake she wanted it. For the neighbours and the community. She wanted to keep her household together, and you had to help her with it.
And she wanted it, in spite of years of training in dissembling, and for the sake of a good farewell, all candid and sincere as well. For that not one of you was equipped.
She knew it very well, even though all her preparations proceeded according to plan. A grimace of chill chagrin was around her mouth, her crooked shoulder was skewer and sharper as she bustled about.
You couldn’t help her. How were the two of you to break through it? Table settings, words of welcome, pluming fountains, the prescribed dishes carried in steaming at the prescribed hour. That was the order of Grootmoedersdrift, the tradition, an annual institution, the swank party for Jakkie, the only child, the heir, the eternal to-do about him.
You took no initiative. You surrendered yourself to Agaat’s ministrations, also to her attempts at reconciliation if that was what one could call them: The passing of an object marginally closer than was necessary, the less formal tone, the stray remarks on the weather that she slipped in, the rose in the vase on the dining table in the evenings, the extra trouble she took with your and Jak’s food and clothes.
Give me your party dresses, Ounooi, Agaat would say after lunch, let me go through them a bit for you, there won’t be time at the last minute. Her tone was strict, but in her eyes there was something pleading.
Two days later all the dresses with seams and hems taken in or let out as necessary and buttons and zippers sewn on, washed and ironed and fragrantly arrayed in your wardrobe. And all you could say was: Thank you, Gaat, I never seem to get round to it myself.
To win Jak’s favour Agaat unpacked his whole shoe cupboard and waxed and polished everything, even his riding saddles and leggings.
These she then left in a line in front of the cupboard for a day or two so that he could inspect them before she packed them away.
And Jak, too, could say nothing but: Thank you, Gaat, what is a farmer without well-maintained footwear.
With such little sentences you all defused the tension between you, that which you would conspire to withhold from Jakkie.
Are there ashtrays in the marquee, Gaat? you’d ask, when in fact what you really wanted to ask was: Is there a chance, do you think, that we could persuade him to stay on for a few days after the guests have left?
Will you make two green and two red pennants for the landing strip, Gaat? Jak asked and Agaat would set her mouth in a tight line and go and execute the task conscientiously and Jak would follow her with his eyes, you could see, with his real question congealed on his lips: Do you know how long his pass is this time? Do you know where he’s planning to go when his contract expires?
Shall we order ice in town, Ounooi? Then they’ll deliver it on Friday at seven, half we can keep in the little slaughterhouse’s cool-room for the Saturday? Agaat asked while you could tell from her tone that she really wanted to say: I’d never chuck hot water on you, surely you know that!
It was as if you’d all thrown in the towel.
Yes, Gaat, Jak would often say of an evening just before Jakkie’s arrival, a glass of wine nonchalantly in his hand, whatever would we have done without you? Here we are stuck on Grootmoedersdrift, worn down in body and spirit, and you place liver patties and tomato salad before us and set the pace every day. Don’t you ever get tired of it, then?
You looked at her where, without any sign of even having heard, she was dishing up food. Solid under the lamplight her bib, her chest solid, like a wall, invisibly inscribed, from the moment you took her in, with your and Jak’s pronouncements, your prescriptions and prohibitions. A wall, a heart of stone that the two of you had implanted in her. And that was all that she could give back to you.
You watched her, her gestures, her phrases, her gaze. She was a whole compilation of you, she contained you within her, she was the arena in which the two of you wrestled with yourselves.
That was all that she could be, from the beginning.
Your archive.
Without her you and Jak would have known nothing of yourselves. She was your parliament, your hall of mirrors.
What must it feel like to be Agaat? How could you ever find that out? Would you be able to figure out what she was saying if she could explain it?
She would have to explicate it in a language other than the tongue you had taught her.
How would you understand her then? Who would interpret for her?
Privately you thought if the new heaven and the new earth were to be an empty, light place without discord or misunderstanding, then you would in spite of everything prefer life on Grootmoedersdrift with Agaat to beatitude, and surrounding you, instead of the heavenly void, the mountains and rivers and humped hills of the Overberg. And you would between yourselves devise an adequate language with rugged musical words in which you could argue and find each other. The language of reed and rushes. For, you thought, what would be the joy of finding each other without having been lost to each other?
Only when Agaat was present, in those last weeks before the feast, could you talk and could Jak talk, could you speak normal sentences to each other.
Was it in this time that Jak without any explanation came to sleep in your bed a few nights? Daddy-like in his pyjamas, complete with his glasses and book?
It was in spite of himself, you thought. And because he knew that it was too late. To seek consolation against the knowledge. That’s why he came, towards bedtime, with his pillows and his glass of water.
Neither of you made any overtures to the other. Each occupied a side of the bed. He slept quietly, you could hardly feel his heat and his weight. Like a husk you thought, a dry membrane. In the morning when you woke up, he was gone.
When Agaat wasn’t present, when you were alone together, you endured each other wordlessly. When in the evenings she drew the kitchen door shut, after she’d rinsed your teacups, and you heard her talking to the dogs, heard her enter the outside room, then it was a consolation for the two of you, where you were left behind under the shaded light of the table lamps in the sitting room, to know that she would be at her post the following morning, and that she would be there when Jakkie arrived and that she would help mediate his departure.
His departure! You didn’t want to consider it.
Where did he want to go? You could see that it upset Jak terribly.
You couldn’t talk to each other about it. Together you brushed your teeth and had your baths in the bathroom, until at last one turned the back on the other.
Jakkie’s mother and father, Agaat’s household, you thought, what are we more than that? And what have we made of them? But it was Agaat who was more urgent in your stocktaking.
What would Agaat do before going to bed, you lay there wondering wide-eyed in the dark next to Jak.
How would she get round to unbuttoning her uniform in front, and pulling out the pins of her cap and putting it down? Would she close her eyes first before looking at herself in the mirror without the white peak? And would she then stick her hands into the combed-flat mat of hair and massage her scalp? Would she work loose her hair until it stood in tag-locks around her head and would that then make her feel different? Look at herself in the mirror and smile? Fling her head back and laugh and stretch her arms above her head and roll her head on her shoulders so that the shadows of her hairdo slid over the linoleum like tumbleweed in a high wind?
Would something like that be possible in that outside room? Such a secret other self, such a concealed feral energy?
It was a fantasy you couldn’t sustain for long, so mendacious, so banal was it. It was what one read in bad novels. In such a book Agaat would then have had a band of supporters, a claque of hand-clappers and whistlers, a villain with a feather in his hat who could egg her on.
No, it couldn’t be like that. She would creak and rustle as she stepped out of her stays and, square in her full-length petticoat, hand on her side, glared at the cap, at the apron, glared at the black dress, lying in a heap there on the floor. She would drape herself in her nightgown like a toga and betake herself to her bed in grim and magisterial dudgeon.
You wanted to soothe yourself with these images. You knew none of it really fitted. There was no sportiveness and there was no self-importance either.
You knew how it would really be, as if you yourself knew the steps.
It would be quiet there. The linoleum on the cement would scrunch sandily under her feet. It would smell of soap and starch, of freshly ironed laundry. The bare light bulb would cast its shadow on the floor, in the hollowed-out seat of the collapsed easy chair. The embroidered cloths would radiate starkly from the walls, Moses in the burning bramble-bush, Elijah in his chariot of fire.
Perhaps she would switch off the light and first sit still for a while in a chair to think over the day?
Perhaps she would light a little fire to ponder by?
But you knew that even that was your own wishful thinking.
There was not then, at that stage, any space between Agaat and Agaat.
She was in preparation for Jakkie’s arrival and Jakkie’s departure.
She was living outside herself, leaner, sharper, like somebody the day before she leaves on a journey, the suitcases all packed, the usual routine scaled down and intense.
In that room.
There everything would be tidy and bare and rustling.
Rapidly she would wash, rapidly dry herself, thoroughly as in an institution, without dawdling, without a single gesture of self-cherishing. Everything would be in its place, as if for inspection. No tarrying, no reflection.
She would switch off the light at the door and wait in the dark for a moment until she could see again. Barefoot she would walk to the bed, hitch up her nightdress, get onto the bed with one knee first, worm in under the tensed sheets, without burrowing them loose, find a hollow for her head.
Would she lie open-eyed in the dark, first with her face to the window onto the yard? Would she lie looking at the glow of the moon through the curtains? Through a chink? At a star?
No, she would turn round on the other side, with her face to the wall.
And then with a sigh, a sigh you’d want to allow her, she’d close her eyes to sleep.
You thought all these things. All the time in that period before Jakkie’s birthday you thought about Agaat.
How did it come about then that that July of all Julys you once again forgot her birthday? For the third time?
…
waterchair coalblack hoisting sound at high C soap-resistant insulated rustfree synthetically upholstered so as not to scratch the bathtub weight limit 200 kilos for stouter fatter cripples but a thin one a lightweight to hoist her a joke to let down a doddle to bathe her child’s play on a double-decker bench minus armrests screwed to the water’s edge lower than the wheelchair so that she can slip effortlessly into it aquasitz by julius bach as one would expect from germans seatbelt neckring hydraulically we row along row along press the button then she rises up derricked over the edge and then again lowered to the bottom a light shock adjust the backrest lie back relax unlike the inner tube on which she gyrates on the whirlpool what is that she hears? a demonstration lesson? doctor unpacking bench again agent of bach in africa? but he left a long time ago! what does she hear in the dead of night? over and over the hoisting sound up and across and down seventy times seven times? she takes to her ibot mute medium cruise down the passage who’s there all alone in her bath? neck clamped in hoops straps tightened asleep in the waterchair? she sounds alarm with her chicken-claw waltzing mathilda jesu joy of man’s desiring blue danube jeepers creepers where’d ya get them peepers strangers in the night what a wonderful world who thinks it all up for the mutes? the walkers the waltzers the yearners? Your call will be answered her rescuer is out of reach in the dry bathtub hands folded on the chest the little one enfolded in the larger legs out straight ankles next to each other black and white and brown how rich her colour how soft her skin in the stark white cradle a capsule chair a space flight get up bathmaster! wake up gatekeeper! it’s not time yet for the last voyage sing to me if you knew susie as I know susie beyond the robot notes sing loud and clear a human song sing! a vulgar caterwauling against this drawn-out decrepitude
…
7 June 1954
Quite shaky now, ai good heavens! I had to dose Agaat with a tranquilliser and take some drops myself. So there we had a whole drama this evening coming back from the dance in town, just as well we didn’t stay too late.
I no longer lock her door, except when Jak and I go out, then I feel it’s safer like that. I always put her to sleep in any case before we leave. But as soon as I put my foot inside the door tonight, I knew something was wrong.
There she was huddled in the corner, eyes staring in the head, lucky I went to look immediately! With the funnel of the bellows in her mouth. Blood everywhere on the bedding, from her hands, nails torn to pieces to the quick. Won’t talk, shock or something. Thought at first she’d been assaulted, but the door was locked and I had the key in my handbag. Just now when I went to check, saw the scratch marks on the door, pure splinters! Some panic or other? I can’t understand it! Had to bandage her little hands, what a struggle to straighten the arms, her whole body convulsed again.
8 June 1954
Mystery cleared up! Only this morning discovered the poo and pee in the corner of the room, under the old telephone directory that I’d given her to play with! Saar, good Lord the woman! forgot yesterday to replace the little chamber pot in the back room after she’d cleaned it! That such a little oversight could cause such a setback, breaks my heart! Probably thought she was going to be given a hiding again because she’d soiled. So she tried to break down the door.
Now I have to start all over again.
It’s not your fault, you had no choice, I’ve been trying to explain for a whole day, you don’t get punished if you couldn’t do anything to prevent a bad thing. You don’t get punished just because you’re a human with natural needs. It was an accident! It’s not so bad! It’s just an old telephone book! Where else were you supposed to? If you have to go, you have to go. It’s Saar’s fault. I’ve scolded Saar.
It looks as if she doesn’t understand me. Has a wild look in her eyes.
9 June
Constipated! Understandable, shame. Doesn’t want to eat.
10 June
Still hasn’t pooed since the fright of the other evening. Small hand got hurt badly from digging away at the door.
11 June
Ai good Lord, gave Brooklax to get her tummy going, so then she soiled her pants and ran away I can’t find her! Just hope I haven’t caused a whole problem here.
15 June
Made a huge fire for her and danced and blew with the bellows and pretended we were witches, who’s afraid of a big bad poo. Going better!
17 June 1954
Every day great progress now, I feel. She’s speaking fluently now. She gets a hiding with the duster-stick if she speaks on the in-breath and if she stuffs her knuckle into her mouth and if she doesn’t look into my eyes nicely when she talks. That’s the minimum, I say, you talk properly with a straight-out breath, you breathe between every sentence and you look at people full-face, otherwise people will think you’re devious.
11 July 1954
Suppose A. must have a birthday some time or other. Phoned Ma to have enquiries made about her date of birth at the hovels on Goedbegin.
She says they don’t know exactly. It was before the winter, they think end May ’47 or ’48. So she must have been four or five when I found her. But May has passed, I don’t suppose it matters that much.
And Lys sends greetings, apparently. I’m going to bake a chocolate cake tonight with six candles on it. Tomorrow is the day! Agaat’s birthday. I feel I must celebrate it so that she can start becoming human here on Gdrift. Explained to her nicely: we commemorate the day that the Lord gave you as gift to yourself and to me.
12 July half past eight
Perhaps not such a bright idea to let Agaat have a birthday. Didn’t occur to me that you need other people for such a birthday. In the end had Saar’s children come in their Sunday best. Handed out cake and cooldrinks at a little table in the backyard. Had to keep an eye all the time. As soon as I turn my back, the taunting starts. Donkey-jaw, dassie-paw. I make eye signals at Agaat. Never mind, they don’t know any better. Later just sent the children home and phoned Beatrice to come over. Made Agaat recite rhymes and tell us tales in the sitting room and clapped hands every time when she’d finished. Everything from jack be nimble jack be quick to let us shine for Jesus.
Beatrice can’t believe it, good heavens, she says, but her praise doesn’t sound genuine, she thinks I’m batty to put so much into the child, she says I’m neglecting my social life, she asks what Jak says about it all and then I’m very cautious what I say. Beatrice is at heart a head-girl. She’ll never do anything that deviates, take a risk or put herself at hazard for something or somebody else. Never take sides. I understand more clearly all the time that I’ll have to believe in this on my own, even though it’s literally what everybody is always preaching and professing. Perhaps their problem is exactly that I’m taking the Word so literally.
16 August 1954
Today we gardened all day, first plaited a garland from tulip stems and sorrel flowers and then sowed herb seeds in the backyard, I make her chew the seeds to teach her the taste of everything: coriander, dill, poppy-seed, she likes dill best. What does it taste like? I ask. Like drop, she says with a clever face, liquorice. You get drop from me when you’re good, soethout, I teach her the Afrikaans word, sweetwood because it’s sweet, Agaat because she’s good. Drop is drop, she says. So what’s a dropper? Perhaps she’s very intelligent, she must have heard us talking at fencing-time. A hanging picket, I teach her, because it’s not anchored, it just hangs in the fence.
13 September 1954
Now that the soul is awakening in her and she’s outgrown the terrors of her origins, at least in body (weight and height normal for the first time now), it’s time for Agaat to be baptised. As long as it’s a private ceremony, says Dominee, it can take place in the white church. He’ll arrange for witnesses. He agrees that it’s time for her to have the faith of her guardian beatified in her so that she can grown up in the mercy of the covenant.
14 September
Difficult to explain to A. about the baptism. Now that she’s nice and grown up and can sing and speak, I said, and is obedient and can wash and dress herself and can fasten her buttons and buckles and knows the Bible stories and says her prayers every evening, she must be branded on the forehead as a child of the Lord with water from the font.
Must I sit in a chair with my mouth wide open? she asks. Didn’t understand at first, only after a while remembered about the tooth-pulling. Must have made a big impression.
I took out the album with my own christening-photos to explain. She was fascinated by the christening-dress, went and dug it up out of the linen cupboard to show her. Moths had got into it, full of holes, will have to get rid of it, will in any case probably never be used on Grootmoedersdrift. Over and over she touched the pleats and frills and double collars of the outfit. Old-fashioned full of frills the old thing, still from Ma’s family. Why a dress like that? she asks.
Christening-dress, confirmation dress, wedding dress, shroud, the four dresses in a woman’s life in Christ, I explained. Showed her my wedding dress with the sewn-on voile sleeves. And there I started crying on the pages. Little brown finger smoothes away the wetness. Then I felt the little hand in mine, the first time so of her own accord.
Nothing to about cry, I hear.
First had to go to the bathroom to regain control of myself. Too much intimacy not a good thing now. She must learn to know her place here.
20 September
Finished smocking Agaat’s white christening-dress. Looks ever so smart in it. Made her try it on tonight before bedtime to pin up the hem.
Must I lie with my legs open before the font? she asks. Still the day of the doctors haunting her.
Tried to explain, it’s not her legs that she needs to open but her heart, it’s not her body but her soul that we’re talking about, as her body was healed by the doctor, the Dominee will now mend her soul so that one day she can get into heaven with the angels. She doesn’t understand. Are there going to be cold shiny things that they push into me? No, I say, only the service, and she must just answer yes to all the questions, so that her name that she’s been given can be written in the Great Book of Life. Otherwise what? she asks. Otherwise Agaat Lourier will blow around without any purpose, a floating seed in the wind and will never fall to the ground and perish and bear good fruit, I say. She regards me with big eyes.
21 September
Nightmares and bedwetting last night. Agaat says she doesn’t want to be baptised. I say she must, otherwise she’ll burn in the devil’s fiery hell. She asks who’s the devil, does he have bellows, she says she knows fires, she’d rather burn, she’s not scared. I say if she’s good we can make a fire the evening of the christening and dance. I’ll bake an orange cake. She says she wants to take her bellows along to the christening. It must absolutely be polished for the occasion.
23 September ten o’clock
Christening thank God all over late this afternoon! A whole business before the time. Should have expected it, I suppose. Agaat ran away when she had to get dressed. Had to run after her and catch her, Saar and I. Cornered her down in the poplar grove against the bank. Rigid with ferocity again. Had to give her a few good strokes on the buttocks. Didn’t want to dress herself. Had to be stuffed into her new clothes piece by piece, white socks up to the knees and shiny shoes, head drawn into the shoulder because the gauze of the bonnet supposedly scratched her in the neck. Your head must be covered in the house of the Lord, I said. Didn’t want to let go of the bellows when we had to leave. More than quarter of an hour late. You’re disgracing me with your devils on this great day, I said. A Child of the Lord doesn’t behave like this. Remember your name means Good, I said, and today you’re being given that name by the dominee, he’s the servant of the Lord. Does the dominee wear a coat like the doctor’s? she asks.
Ds van der Lught fortunately patience itself. Let be, he said when I wanted to take away the bellows and settle the bonnet. He’d commandeered the verger and the organist and oubaas Groenewald who looks after the gardens for the occasion. And apart from that it was just the principal elder and myself. Jak would have nothing to do with it. Ma neither.
Yellow light through the wrinkled glass of the church window, Agaat’s skin whiter than it is. Cold there in the bare benches, such a thin little tune on one note on the organ from high up in the dark gallery. Agaat all goose pimples when I took her to the front to stand for the service. Bellows drag along. Dominee peers sternly from under his eyebrows as if Agaat and I were guilty of much more than just original sin. We sing:
Jesus, Lord, our hope so true,
we’re here to do as you ordain:
Our children we all bring to you—
their share in you for good to claim.
In the name of God the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost for ever,
Lord, we ask that this child may
serve thee as long as she may live
and also find in every way
You are good and will forgive.
Oh we praise thee, faithful Father!
Guide us with our children further.
Then the organist came down and the dominee said: We and our children, and our foundlings, those whom we protect and take pity on, the heathens whom we save from damnation, are conceived and born in sin, the sprinkling with water shows the impurity of our souls. We must distrust ourselves and seek salvation outside ourselves.
The late-afternoon sun through the yellow glass catches the shiny edge of the font, it looks as if there’s no water in it, I hold Agaat’s hand tightly, feel her strain backwards as Dominee’s voice becomes progressively deeper and heavier. Thought he might have kept it a bit shorter, it’s only Agaat after all. But perhaps I was the one who had to hear it all one more time. Old Groenewald stands there with his hands crossed over his crotch, nods his head, twirls his thumbs over each other. Real old actor.
We must crucify our old selves and live in fear of God. If sometimes through weakness we stumble into sin, we must not doubt the mercy of God or remain wallowing in sin.
Then first a prayer. Close your eyes, I whisper to Agaat, I peep at the elder who’s rocking forward and back and gulping back the sleepiness. Therefore we pray thee to show mercy also to this thine adopted child and to initiate her through the Holy Ghost into Jesus Christ thine son so that through the baptism she may be buried with Him in death and may be resurrected with Him in the new life. Grant that she will shoulder her cross cheerfully in the service of her guardians and her masters, follow Christ daily and adhere to Him in sincere faith, firm hope and ardent love, until eventually she will meekly leave this life that inevitably issues in death for your sake and so that she may on the last day appear fearlessly before the judgement seat of Christ thine Son.
Open your eyes, now you must answer yes to all the questions, I whisper to Agaat. So Dominee peers at Agaat from under his eyebrows. Do you believe in the only true God who created heaven and earth and everything in it out of nothing? Do you believe that nothing in heaven or on the earth happens without His Divine Will? Do you acknowledge that by nature you are wholly incapable of any good and inclined to all evil? Do you profess that through faith you receive forgiveness of your sins in His blood?
Agaat utters just one little peep on an in-breath. I squeeze her in the neck so that she should say yes nicely. But no! She takes the handle of the bellows, she squeezes out a little bit of wind, pffft, hey you! I have to nudge her. The organist catches my eye, suppresses a smile. Then I have to prod her in the back to make her step forward. Come, the Dominee beckons, pushing up his gown a little over his right hand, Agaat pulls back, I take her by both her shoulders and steer her to the front, because by now I can feel she’s preparing to run away, I prod her until she’s standing properly. A cloud moves over the sun, the church goes dark, I feel superstitious, as if the mark of Ham is falling on me as well, hold your head forward, I say, I pull the bonnet backwards, I pinch her in the neck so that she can keep her head up straight, because she keeps on pulling it in as if she’s scared she’ll be slapped.
Agaat Lourier, I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. He sprinkles water on Agaat’s forehead three times. I can feel her stiffen in my grasp, strain back with her head, eyes tightly shut as if it the water were corrosive.
Then another prayer with Dominee’s hand on Agaat’s head. I grip her by the neck so that she can’t pull away. Feel her veins pulsing under my thumbs. Grant that she will live in all justice under our only Teacher, King and High Priest and courageously do battle against and vanquish sin, the devil and all his cohorts and that she will honour and praise the only true God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost for ever and ever. Amen.
Then the organist goes up into gallery again, we few sing for Agaat.
Jesus takes our little children
To himself with a heart of love;
No one ever shall us hinder
That we freely to him move.
Jesus hears our weakest prayer
Wherever on earth we roam.
Day or night, we know he’s there
And we’ll never walk alone.
Jesus Lord so far above us
Leads us on, his willing band,
And we know that he will love us:
He himself has ta’en our hand.
Praise the Lord, in all etern’ty!
Hallelujah! Amen!
The organist had to play loud chords to make up for our meagre sound. A. looks up with staring eyes at the organist up there in the organ cage in front of the mirror amongst the bundle of pipes thick and thin. They’re flutes, I whisper in her ear, they sound like harps and trumpets. Listen well, it’s the voice of the angels of the Lord, they’re calling you to his flock.
Go in peace, says the dominee, and lifts his arms for the blessing. Agaat starts back from the wide black sleeves of the gown.
Then there was only the baptism register to be signed. The stamp already stuck to the certificate. The light had to be switched on in the stuffy side-room because it was already thick twilight. Agaat stands chin on the chest and goes pfft-pfft with the bellows. You see, I say, it didn’t hurt at all. She can now be put through her catechism later in the mission church and become a full member there, says Dominee. Old Groenewald solemnly rummages in his trouser pocket, produces a toffee for A. The elder gives her five rand. For your piggy bank, he says. There’s a whole cake waiting at home, I say, if anybody would like to come over tonight. Thank heavens nobody accepted the invitation. We’d had drama enough for one day, really not in the mood for everybody’s comments and Jak’s attitude.
The organist left the church with us. In the old days, she says to Agaat, they had to produce wind for the organ to play, with a bellows like yours, only a big one. She fiddles around in her bosom, emerges with a lace handkerchief, holds it in front of Agaat’s nose. Smell, it’s got a nice smell, it’s for you so that you can remember your christening. What does one say? I had to prod again. Agaat just moves her lips slightly. I can’t hear, I say, you’re acting really sheepish today. You look a bit pale around the gills, says the verger, eat your toffee so that you can liven up. Never mind, says the organist, it’s over now, must be mighty strange for such a poor little hotnot, where did you find her?
I was bitterly relieved to drive away from there at last.
She didn’t want to eat her evening meal. Had to make the fire that I’d promised her, in the fireplace, she remained sitting there while we ate. Heard her every now and again blowing with the bellows. Went to sleep right there in a little heap. When I picked her up to put her to bed, she opened her eyes. Out of the blue. Straight-out breath, own wind, loud and clear, full sentence: Where is the cross I have to shoulder? Jak heard it. Just you wait, it won’t be long now, he sneered. What in God’s name can he mean by that? Nowadays he looks at me with such an expression of revulsion.
Took her a slice of orange cake and tea to her room. She looks at me with wide eyes while she’s eating it. Full of questions. I’m quite surprised at how much of it she’s remembered. What’s the judgement seat? Why the blood? It’s a fine time to get your voice back, I say, you disgraced me very nicely there in front of the people. Am I bad? she asks, no I say, your name is Good, but you’re inclined to evil like all of us. Why? Because we’re sinful creatures. Is Même also sinful? she asks, so what does Même’s name mean then?
Milla, Kamilla, I’ve never yet wondered about it myself.
It’s the name of a white flower my mother gave to me, I said for want of a better answer. She looks at me as if she doesn’t believe me. Little children like you shouldn’t be bothering their heads with such difficult questions, I say, but I can see she’s not satisfied.
My neck is sore, she complains when I blow out her candle. That’s from pulling your neck in between your shoulders in front of the pulpit, just like a donkey that doesn’t want to be yoked, I say, and I thought I’d seize the opportunity, see, that’s what I mean by sinful, you were very jibbing there in front of the pulpit. That Uncle Tokoloshe’s hand was heavy on my head, she says, and Même’s hand was pushing into my neck. Lord, the child, she’s very precocious.
2 October 1954
Drove to Malgas today with Agaat. Wanted to cross the Breede River by punt, but she refused. Punt, she says over and over, she does it with every new word that she learns. Punt, shunt, cunt, I had to put a stop to it, she’s getting far too forward, but I taught her to rhyme myself and there I have it now! I’ll scrub down your tongue with Sunlight soap, I warn. Really not a good tendency these word games at any time, suitable or not. In the end just shut my eyes and sat with the screaming child in the car till they’d hauled us across. Then went through to Witsand. Rainy there. Picked up shells, pebbles. Taught her all the colours of the sea and the beach. Mother-of-pearl lustre, slate-grey, silver-grey, gull-white, mussel-black, stone-grey. Agaat holds everything against her skin and then against mine. White looks whiter against my skin and grey greyer, she announces solemnly. Just like that. The river mouth lagoon was stormy with waves. Later went to sit by the fire in the hotel to dry out. Fortunately no people in the middle of the week, otherwise she would have had to stay in the car. Can see trouble ahead in public places, but she’s still a child. They brought her hot milk in a tin mug.
5 October
I’m getting Agaat used to her role in the house. Put an apple box in front of the sink so that she can reach. Now washes the coffee cups every morning for me. Already quite adroit with the weak hand, inborn carefulness it seems. I indulge her by letting her wash Jak’s socks and handkerchiefs and underpants in the tub in the backyard. She doesn’t want one to look when she’s working with both hands. Sleeve of weak hand always dirty and wet, she doesn’t want me to roll up that side.
9 October 1954
First reading and writing lesson. Using the Biblical ABC, two birds with one stone, went to unearth old alphabet chart in cellar with which Ma still taught me.
A is for Adam, every animal gets a name.
Then Eve his companion to Paradise came.
B is for Babel, a tower they built.
Confusion of tongues the wages of guilt.
C is for Christ, our Redeemer and Lord:
To Him we must listen, His favour afford.
She holds the pencil in the left hand just like the knife. Still shy of the weak hand, keeps it out of the way, hides it more if one looks. I say, Agaat, the Lord made you like that, you needn’t be ashamed.
10 October
Why do my pebbles and shells go grey? asks Agaat, my tongue is tired with licking them. We put them in a glass bottle next to her bed to look pretty again. Water is to shells what love is to the soul of people, I say. Without love the soul turns grey as ash, and dry and cold. I’m brown as mud and my mouth is full of spit, says Agaat. She licks her forearm and shows me. She tucks her hands under her armpits. Loaves in the oven, she says, warm as warm, feel. Becoming really sharp, the little child.
Phoned Ma to tell her how well we’re getting on, full of insinuations as always: Pleased you have something to warm yourself with, my child.
13 October
To the forest with Agaat. Quite high up in the indigenous bush. Told her about the giant emperor butterfly that’s black on the outside and inside blue like an eye when it spreads its wings. The jewel of the forest. Apatura iris. The eye that guards the secret of the soul. Only good people get to see it. Has Même seen it yet? asks Agaat. She looks at me like that, I can’t lie. I hope to see it in my lifetime, I say. We can come every day, she says, how many days are a lifetime? If we find it, then we catch it and put it in a bottle and then it can’t escape, she says. Cruel little grin. Where does it come from? I mustn’t forget that this child led a different life before I found her. No, I tell her, a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity. Where do the bats live? she asks.
14 October 1954
We now read and write every day. She’s making remarkably quick progress. We count sums on our fingers and toes. Agaat leaves her weak hand out of the count. I give my hand in its place, I turn the page and rub out her wrong-way-round threes and fives when she’s struggling, she keeps one hand under the table.
Together we make up a whole person with two strong hands, I say. Am I your child? asks Agaat. You’re my little monkey, I say. We learn the wind directions and the names of the months and the seasons of the year and its festivals and what they stand for. In this way I feed her a bit of (religious) history. Good Friday, Easter Monday, Van Riebeeck Day, Day of the Covenant. I found you on the Day of the Covenant, do you remember? I ask. That shows that it’s all in the Lord’s plan. She just looks at me wide-eyed.
15 October
Our herbs that we planted are growing lush and beautiful. Agaat picks slips of everything and tastes everything, chews the seeds. Knows all the names, parsley, celery. Fennel still her favourite. Fennel and coriander, I say, the one is like the other. Isn’t, she says, the one is for liquorice, the other is for dried sausage. She’s very perceptive, has an amazing memory, not to be wondered at I suppose, she gets so much attention, I repeat everything until it’s penetrated, a child must be drilled, is what I’ve always believed.
16 October
Gave Saar such a dressing-down this morning. Agaat busy in the backyard washing Jak’s underpants and handkerchiefs and socks in the zinc tub. I hear Saar mocking: You must rub, little girl, you must rub! His snot’s thick and his feet stink and his snake spits such big gobs. The kitchen maids are jealous of Agaat. They’re full of gibes. Won’t allow them to come and spoil all my hard work here.
18 October
Had to intervene today. Saar’s children taunting Agaat in the backyard. Whose child are you can I have one too! So then they grab all the washing she’s done already, throw it into the dust. She does nothing, just juts out the chin. Funny, Agaat doesn’t cry, have never seen her cry no matter what happens. Don’t take any notice of them, I say, they’re not your sort.
This evening at bedtime she says: They say I come from a drunkcunt on the other side of the mountain. Sis, that’s ugly, I say. Clearly old enough to start asking questions now. She looks at me with big eyes. What would she be thinking in that coconut of hers? How much would she remember? I dosed her so heavily to get her here. And then she slept for days from the valerian. Don’t quite know what story to tell her. Perhaps just the simple truth, but I feel now is not the time yet.
I must in any case first write it down myself before I forget it, what it felt like, how it came about. The commission, the task, spelt out in black and white, for her sake, so that she can read it one day (though I wonder anew every day what exactly I’m trying to bring about here and why I’m doing it as I’m doing it, and what’s going to come of it, Heaven forfend!).
Then, tonight as I was getting up off the bed (must have slumbered in for a while there with her), she woke up. Out of the blue she says: Lys is my sister, she showed me how to catch a mole. How do you catch a mole? You look for the hills, you see which one is fresh and then you squat one mole-day away and you pee on the ground. You wait and you wait and you pee and you pee all the time on the same spot. And then? You have your wire and your stick. And then? Then you wait and you keep your eyes open and you say all the time mole, mole, here’s the hole! And then? Then he pushes a hole in that spot because the soil is soft from your pee. Then he pushes, then he pushes, then you wait until he’s pushed hand-high, then you hook the wire quickly into his hole and you jab with the stick, one blow and pluck, then you get him by the hind leg, he can’t see, but he can bite like anything. And then? Then you flatten his head with a stone, then you skin him. Why do you want the skin? It’s soft. How do you get it soft? You stick your wire through, you wind it with your wire, Lys holds the one point, or you hook it to a thorn bush, then you wring the skin every day until it’s soft.
Dear Lord above! Would rather not think what else lurks in that past!
20 October
Took A. to town with me today, had hair appointment, she kept on wanting to take my hand, walk next to me nicely, I said, you don’t hold hands in town, you’re nice and grown-up now. A. very fascinated with the hairdresser, takes the little broom from the servant there and starts sweeping up my hair into the dustpan, where does hair come from? she asks. Otherwise very good all the time while I was doing shopping.
Then I bumped into Beatrice in Kriel and Co. and she says we must go and have a cooldrink at the Good Hope Café. What about Agaat? I ask. Buy her an ice-cream and tell her she must wait outside, says B. Ai, she can be so unfeeling! The child is so small still. No, I say, I’ll speak to Georgie. Hmph, sea kaffir, says Beatrice, he won’t mind, but he should know who’s really his clientele. Then I asked for a table at the back half behind the screen in front of the kitchen door and then the waitress in her white apron and cap, thud, flap, through the swing doors, brings A. a huge cream soda float with a long-stemmed teaspoon and a straw so that her eyes widen like saucers. Then other waitresses come out as well to look at A. Go away, I say, it’s just a child. And then A. eats the whole thing, I should have known it was too much, but B. had ordered it, from spite or something. Her whole face said, so you want to don’t you, now you’d better eat your way through what’s in front of you and see what comes of it. A. sucks and sucks at the milky green stuff in the long glass, her eyes fixed fast on Tretchikoff’s Dying Swan hanging there against the wall. When we got outside, she puked something terrible on the pavement and I held her head over the gutter and B. marched click, clack, on her high heels away from us as if she didn’t know us. Really, some people.
23 October
I show all the pictures of vehicles. Strange response. Ship? I’ll never get into that! Aeroplane? No never, I’ll run away! Train? See it steam, salt-and-pepper-now-I-go-better, I press the two-tone of the train whistle for her on the piano. No, alla, I’ll jump off! I’d rather walk! But you ride down to the lands in the bakkie with me? Yes, but it’s Même who drives it!
27 October 1954
A. was very naughty today. Stole kindling out of the Aga and set fire in the backyard to an unread newspaper and a lot of brand-new brown-paper bags that I use for storing herb seed, the little blighter! Got to her good and well with the duster. Don’t know what I’m going to tell Jak, he has such a thing about his newspaper. Gave her a good fright, pretended to be phoning the police, made as if I was telling the constable on the phone how naughty she was, asked that they should come and take her away and lock her up in a cell with bars behind a great iron door without food and without pee-pot. Now I really scared the blue heebie-jeebies out of her! That’s right, she should rather be scared than get all forward here. Now she’s good and terrified of the telephone. She listens around the corner every time I speak. I make full use of every opportunity. I ring off when I’ve talked to someone, but I keep the receiver to my ear, and pretend I’m telling the dominee and the police and the magistrate all her tricks and transgressions. This is really a very good way I’ve discovered of keeping her in her place.
4 November 1954
Almost the end of the year again. The first year of Agaat’s life with me. How quickly the time has passed! How different to other years!
I want to write up the beginning of the story but it’s so hot and I’m sitting here on the stoep and I’m feeling exhausted. I try to think back to that day, when exactly the idea got hold of me, why I did it. Because some days I really don’t know any more. We make excellent progress three, four days a week and then there’s some or other setback again. And then she has this way of looking at me that drives me wild. As if I’d destroyed her whole life when for once I have to chastise her! How else must she learn what is good and what is bad?
The Lord is my witness, I don’t know if I’m up to this! I sometimes no longer know myself with this child in the house. How is it possible that the small, deformed, pig-headed, mute child in the back room can make me feel like this? It’s she who’s nothing. And all I wanted to do, was to make a human being of her, to give her something to live for, a house, opportunities, love.
I’m frustrated and impatient and I can’t help it, sometimes she nauseates me (yes, I’m ashamed of myself, but it’s true!). The long jaw, the bulbous eyes that can glare so coercively, the untameable woolly mop, the little crank-handle of an arm, the sly manner at times, the cruelty that sometimes breaks through. How does one make a good heart in a creature that’s so damaged? How will I ever put enough flesh on the puny little body? How do I get all her senses and her mind operative? (Not to mention her conscience!). And a will (but obedient!) and a soul? She resists me, she’s a long way from being tamed.
Sometimes I feel as if the child is a dark little storage cubicle into which I stuff everything that occurs to me and just hope for the best and that one day when I open the door, she’ll walk out of there, fine and straight, all her limbs sound and strong, grateful and ready to serve, a solid person who will make all my tears and misery worthwhile. So that I can show all the world: See, I old you! You didn’t want to believe me, did you?
15 November 1954 morning
Saar came to call me just now from the garden in the back, come and see, Mies, what Agaat is playing. On tiptoe through the kitchen door and peep at her from behind the door. Wouldn’t there be an inquisition of the rag doll on the telephone stool! She deliberately places the doll filled with river sand in such a position that she has to fall off. Then she falls off, then she gets a slap, then she falls off, then she gets a finger in the eye!
Sit, doll, sit! If you can’t sit up straight nicely and look at me, and answer me when I speak to you, then I’m phoning the police!
Next thing she clambers onto the telephone stool, takes the receiver off its cradle. Hello, hello police? Come and fetch her, lock her up! She’s full of stuffing! She looks at me cheekily! She plays dumb! She does her business in her panties!
No lack of imagination, whatever else may be wanting!