Agaat (21 page)

Now she'll watch my breathing, bring the spoon into my mouth, tilt it towards the back where she can get hold of my swallowing reflex. I look at her, I look at the spoon, I look at the mirror.

For what are you looking like that, Ounooi?

Ounooi. For the sake of bread and bougainvillea!

She looks where I'm looking in the mirror, its edges brimming with bougainvillea, suspended in a tree-lined landscape. There's a flash.

Birds, tiny birds, white-eyes that fly away from the fig tree I can't see, that grows just around the corner. That I, Lord, can't see. The early figs at the top ripe bells. The first light-green figs on a plate arranged with a flare of purple bougainvillea, that was how I served them, for the season, to mark it, to celebrate it, midsummer on Grootmoedersdrift. My figs.

Hmm, says Agaat, we must see if there are any figs yet, the tree around the corner here is dragging its branches on the ground this year.

She suspects something, she swivels her neck, she keeps on looking with me in the mirror. Determined to twist my arm to eat. The windmill must turn, the thresher must churn. The pumpkin must in.

And the bougainvillea, it's flowering as if it's never going to stop.

Is she taunting me? Does she think I must take my cue from it, from the flowers, from the wheat, from the bread?

I have ears to hear, I flicker, how many more times are you going to say it today? Since when do you expect me to compete with bougainvilleas? But she doesn't look at me.

She keeps on looking away at the stoep door. I see her neck, the neck of Agaat from the side with the constellation of dark moles, and the row of hairpins securing the white cap.

Slowly she turns her head back, careful on her perch to get the best from the moment, focused on putting me in a place where I'll submit and blink my eyes to say, yes I will eat, you may approach with your teaspoon, Agaat, depress it slowly on the tip of my tongue and slide it firmly upwards all along the middle to halfway, so that I have less work to do, and I will swallow what you have prepared for me. So nourish also our souls.

But I don't do it. The fragments of green in the mirror are a reproduction, a repetition of another plan, in another format. As a map is of a place. If I can get her to grasp the analogy. Mirror, map, reproduction, repetition.

I press my gaze against the front of Agaat's white cap. As if it's a sail and my will a wind.

I look past her at the mirror and then quickly at the wall next to my bed. At the mirror, at the wall. From the fragmented garden to the off-white surface of the wall. From what is lacking in the reflected summer to what is lacking on the despoiled wall, an image, a hill farm on a flat plan, suspended by its loop from the picture rail. To and fro I look, to and fro, with the white-eyes that flash in the mirror, around the invisible corner, to the invisible fig tree. Agaat, don't you see then, the unseeable, this goodly frame the earth, don't you see it, quartered by the compass, east west south north! The yard, the dam, the mountain, the drift!

Slowly she retreats from me. She places the teaspoon on the saucer's edge. She slides off her high perch next to my bed.

Lower the girl, she says softly on a held-in breath through her teeth.

To and fro she looks, as I looked, I flicker my eyes all the time. She looks at me, she looks where I'm looking, she nods slowly.

Mirror, mirror, she says, is it bothering you? Seen too much? On the wall? Seen it all?

That's a start! I signal. You're warm! That's excellent progress! Yes, I signal, yes Agaat, you're on the right track! Now just think further! Now just think: map on the wall, think flat earth, think pictured palm of hand, think life-line, think fingerprint!

Agaat gives me her eyes. I look deep into them, I take hold of her eyes with mine, I bend them to the door, down the passage, all the way to the front room, to the sideboard next to the wall, to the quivers lying there, behind the photo albums. I close my eyes slowly and keep them closed. I gather a sheaf, from behind her apron, from out of her chest. I see a great sailing ship tacking against the wind with billowing sails. Keel-deep in the waving wheat she comes towards me, hill crest after hill crest, disappearing in the troughs, every time bigger as she reappears till I can hear her apron creaking in the swells and can make out her figurehead, the profile of a Fate, the jaw set to brave without retort the storms that she has predestined.

Only when it really dawned on him that he was going to be a father, did Jak start treating you slightly better. You didn't altogether trust it. It was the eighth month of your pregnancy and all of a sudden you were being showered with all kinds of gifts, an LP with saxophone music which, it must be said, didn't do much for you,
Wonderland by Night
, perfume by Elizabeth Arden, a new tea set. He even took you into Swellendam for
Die Heks
by Leipoldt which an amateur dramatic company was staging. Not that he'd given it much thought, but you appreciated the effort.

You had to listen to his fantasies of how the child would look just like him, what sterling blood flowed in the de Wet veins and how he was going to bring him up to be strong and fit just like his father, a gentleman farmer. In the evenings he drew plans of toys that he wanted to build for the child. Kites from which one could hang, aeroplanes, rockets that could really take off.

You asked, what if it's a little girl? In his family, Jak said, the firstborn was always a boy.

You watched this husband of yours in the evenings as he washed his face and brushed his teeth, standing stooped over in his underclothes. Sometimes as he removed the towel from his face, it seemed to you as if he was going to cry. Sometimes you found him paging through one of your books on the night-table and shutting it quickly when he saw you looking. At night he left the stoep room and came and lay behind your back like a little boy. In the mornings when you woke up he was gone.

As meek as he was with you, so volatile was he with the labourers. He would berate them for the slightest infraction. You'd always chosen to overlook those things, the sugar and the coffee disappearing from the house, the dogs' bones vanishing from the meat cooler outside, but Jak took up arms against them. He lay in wait for the kids who stole pumpkins from the roof of the shed at night, and shot at them with the air gun. You knew about it because their mothers brought them to you mewling with the pellets that had become infected in their buttocks. You had to remove them with needles burnt clean and provide ointment and plasters until the wound had cleared up. They never said what had happened, and some of them didn't even know, because Jak of course didn't let himself be seen. When you dug out the pellet with the mother holding down the screaming child on the kitchen table, you said, don't look, and spirited away the evidence between your breasts.

One evening you put the pellets in Jak's plate. There were five of them.

Jake, these are children, you said, they can take as many pumpkins as they like, it's not as if you eat them. And you don't plant them either and you don't water them and you don't stack them on the roof, they're my pumpkins with which I earn a little extra at the market to pay the servants, I might as well just regard it as part of their wages.

He said nothing, put the pellets in his shirt pocket.

The children grow up here on the farm, you said, when they're grown men they'll remember it, aren't you ashamed of yourself?

The creatures just breed here, Jak said, I've a good mind to fire the whole lot, they can't do as they like on my yard, they're just loafing about and getting up to mischief.

You can't do as you like on the yard either, you said. They're human beings, remember, not cattle.

You stopped talking when the food was brought in. You put your finger on your lips to warn Jak not to talk further.

But he'd already said it.

You get the creatures accustomed to everything, Milla, he said, you're the one who creates expectations, not me. Remember, give them
the little finger and they'll take the whole hand, don't come and complain to me one day if they come to confront you with all kinds of demands. Mark my words, the Romans knew it long before us, give a hotnot a hard master and he'll long for a soft master, give him a soft master and he'll start dreaming of being his own master. Is that what you want? And then where do you think we'll bloody well end up in this country?

It was the old pattern. The political justification of downright meanness.

Shooting at children as if they were baboons, you said, has nothing to do with politics, Jak.

And you teaching them the alphabet as if they were parrots? What does that have to do with? And then you think you can contain it afterwards? You may think you know all about farming, Milla, but you mustn't come and tell me about politics.

What could you do? You couldn't even stop him ranting for all the world to hear.

Let them hear who have ears to hear, Milla, he said when you tried to silence him, I won't be shunted around in my own home. Not by a long shot.

That last while before Jakkie's birth you couldn't inform yourself at first hand, your legs were swollen and you no longer went out into the yard so often. But you knew in a matter of minutes if anything happened.

Who came to tell you about the fighting? That Jak first shoved Koos Makkelwyn because he gave him lip?

Initially it wasn't clear to you what had happened. And you could get nothing from Jak himself. Bedraggled, his riding clothes full of dust and horse manure and his riding-helmet dented, he arrived at home in the middle of the afternoon to take a bath and then he left again in the bakkie without a word.

Makkelwyn was a sturdy, neat man in his fifties whom Jak had hired specially to look after his stable horses. He was a farrier and breaker-in of wild horses and in the mornings arrived, quite the dandy, on a dapple-grey ambler from The Glen, where he was stable-master. His people, the McCalvins, had since time immemorial been the farriers in the region.

You had Dawid called in when Jak had left. So then he brought along his father.

You can still see them standing there in the kitchen, the old man in his seventies, and his son, both with the Okkenel crooked mouths and light-green eyes, and with their oily khaki hats in their hands. In
Dawid's other hand the gleaming riding crop, incongruous against the dirty pants, the scuffed shoes.

What happened in the stable, Dawid? Spit it out!

You were irritated. Why had the old man come along? When OuKarel put in an appearance in the kitchen, you knew from childhood, then there was trouble. You were tired. You weren't in a mood for trouble.

Dawid looked at his father.

Talk, the old man said to him, I'm here as your witness.

Dawid looked you straight in the eye. You didn't like it.

Mister Makkelwyn ticked off the baas. He rubbed against the leg of his pants with the crop.

Over what?

Because the baas rides the horses through the piss and then Mister Makkelwyn has to struggle with foundered horses for days.

And then?

Then the baas shoved him in the chest and told him to shut his bloody trap.

And then?

Then Mister Makkelwyn said he wouldn't shut his trap and he wouldn't be sworn at and shoved around by a pipsqueak who had no respect for a noble animal.

Dawid shifted his weight.

Carry on, OuKarel said.

Then the baas whipped him across the face with the crop and then Mister Makkelwyn grabbed the tip of the crop and then the baas pulled Mister Makkelwyn down on the ground and wanted to kick him and then Mister Makkelwyn grabbed the baas by the leg and then he fell and by this time they're both flat on the ground rolling in the straw and horse-shit and the baas can't get the better of Mister Makkelwyn, because Mister Makkelwyn holds him down so that he can't do a thing.

And then?

And then the baas shouts at me and says why am I just standing there can't I see the bloody Spout-mongrel has him by the throat I must help I must take the hay fork.

The Aga's door slammed and the fire leapt out of the plate-holes as the evening meal was being warmed.

Dawid looked away.

Nooi, he said, I'm sorry . . .

For what, Dawid?

Again Dawid looked at his father.

The old man was to the point, but you could see he had something else on his mind, there was an expression on his face as if he was rehearsing to look pathetic.

My hip is sore, my boy, have your say and have done, Karel said, the people want to cook their evening food here.

You saw how OuKarel was looking at the saucepans as the lids were lifted and the food was stirred with the pot-spoons. Meat with dumplings and sweet potatoes and fennel bulbs with white sauce it was. The beetroot salad was being grated together with onion. There was a bacon and spinach soup. A lot of food for three people. The old man's eyes were starting to water from it all.