Agaat (87 page)

Jakkie got up, threw down his napkin. Jak leant over the table and pushed him back into his chair.

No, have a seat first so that I can tell you something, man, he said, as if he were at a congenial gathering of farmers.

He started in a roundabout way, with Elsa Joubert's book about which people were writing letters in the press at the time. The one your mother bought and never finished, he said, ostensibly because it was too sad, as if your mother's ever had problems with any sadness. His eyes played mockingly over you, but you weren't the one in his sights. Jakkie must explain to him what structural violence is, he said.

Jakkie looked up and looked away, his body was quaking with the trembling of his legs under the table. Agaat tried to sidle away towards the kitchen.

Then Jak got up and pulled out the chair at the far end of the table, tap-tapped his hand on the backrest.

Come, Gaat, come and sit down for a while, this was always your place, wasn't it, he said. You must listen very carefully now, your kleinbaas, Captain de Wet here, is going to give us an exposition. I don't see any structural violence or any other violence against you except that little half-way arm of yours. Fucked crooked or kicked crooked, doesn't matter. No long journeys for you, only a nice servant's room with a fireplace, settled for life here on Grootmoedersdrift. Structural advantages, I'd say. White people's food, white people's language, a white apron, white sheets and here's your little white pet who shares his little secrets with you that his own mother and father aren't allowed to hear. They hear only the little white lies. Come on, Jakkie, tell us, what is structural violence?

Jak walked around the table and gestured to Agaat to sit down on the chair. For a moment you thought he was going to take her by the
thin arm, but he didn't, he just gestured with his head. Agaat shut off her regard. Very upright, very rigidly she sat down on the edge of the chair.

White tablecloths, white candles, fragrant white flowers, Jak said and gestured with open arms, so white is she that she plays back all the little white things as she knows we like them. Exactly what old Poppie Whatsername also did, recounted her miseries as she knew the writer wanted to hear them, a story that could be sold, it's being translated into all kinds of languages nowadays, they say. Even shares in the profits, the kaffir-girl. Remarkable business, Afrikaners making a name for themselves with coon stories that they pick up in the backyard and spread far and wide as gospel truth.

Jak took a large gulp from his glass.

Should your father tell you what he thinks, Jakkie? He thinks the world finds us whites in this country interesting only for what we're supposed to have done to the hotnots and the kaffirs. And then they're going to hold it against us all over again because we dare write down on behalf of the so-called victims what we did to them. No, we should rather kindly teach the poor devils to write their own stories and package it for them. First-class export produce. Whether we'll then see anything of the profits is another matter!

Jak's tongue was dragging. His gestures were emphatic.

At least he's not violent, you thought. You tried to catch Agaat's eye in case he should become violent. She feigned blindness to you, her eyes were on Jakkie who was taking substantial gulps from his new glass of wine.

How about it, Agaat? Jak prodded, you're the exception here after all. Your nooi has already taught you nicely how to write, hasn't she. Dear sir, yours respectfully, if I may make so bold. More Afrikaans than the whole lot of newspaper journalists can dream of. You after all write long letters to dear gracious Captain de Wet here. He can surely not have thrown them away. Perhaps he should collect them and post them to dear Mrs Joubert so that she can brush up your Dutch a bit so that everyone can understand it. Then you'll have a new life. Then they'll come and interview you. That Poppie didn't know whether she was coming or going, so, apparently, they thronged around her to make TV movies. Over and over the same story of her long journey she had to tell, she must have got bored to death, wouldn't surprise me if in the end she started adding on a journey here and a journey there, to at least keep the matter interesting for herself.

Jakkie shook his head, covered his face with his hands.

Jak, that's enough, you said.

Jak kept talking over your interjection. How about it, Agaat? You wouldn't have to add on anything if they asked you. Your story is better than the back page of the
Rapport
.

Bring pen and paper, then I'll give you the long and short of it, he said to Agaat.

She didn't move, remained looking in front of her. Jak walked up and down dictating.

White woman childless steals baby woolly with one arm stop one-armed woolly catches baby boy on mountain pass stop toy aeroplane explodes stop woolly saves stop woolly gives tit/shit/bread/head.

Perhaps you'd prefer a little song, Jak said. Your mother here after all always taught you little songs. That's what you understand.

Jak didn't sing. Here beyond the hill on our farm, he said, the sheep get bluetongue, the wheat gets rust, wifey blubbers, hubby batters, you name it, every disaster in the book.

And then? The son grows up, he squashes his father flat on the rocks of the Huis River, he becomes a soldier, a fighter pilot, for three years he bombs every FAPLA, SWAPO, MPLA and Cuban from an Impala in the moonlight in South West.

And look at him now! Strikes a funk at twenty-five in the year of our Lord nineteen eighty-five in our beleaguered South Africa, with bugger-all to say for himself. Just when we need him most.

And the woolly just writes on.

Jak first saluted Agaat, and then Jakkie.

I'm sure you are aware, dear Captain, that Mrs de Wet, your esteemed mother, opens all her servant's letters to her son here . . .

Jakkie glared at you for a moment, and then at Agaat. He blinked his eyes slowly, and put his head on his arms on the table.

So, Agaat, Jak said, that's the story. Can you think us up a conclusion? After all, you're used to embroidering!

How long did it last? Half an hour, an hour? Jak looked as if he was going to start crying. He slammed his fist on the table, but there was no strength in the blow.

Don't you people have anything to say? he shouted.

He rocked drunkenly on his feet.

Don't you have anything to say then! What does one have to do to make you wake up? Spineless! That's why things will end badly for us! That's why the enemy is sharpening its teeth on our borders! The Afrikaner women, they who should be carrying the torch, they're useless, the Afrikaner youth, characterless, without ideals, even the Afrikaner
skivvies are struck dumb! Is this what our ancestors tamed this land for with their muzzle-loaders, with the clothes on their bodies and their wagons against the barbarian hordes? Come, Agaat, where are the days when your kind cut the throats of their masters in their sleep?

Then you'll have something to write about, instead of the sentimental chirry-chirping of yours, one two buckle my shoe, onky-bonky here's my donkey, pat-a-cake, as if you're in a children's book, not exactly top secrets that you're sharing with your kleinbaas the traitor!

Jak sank unsteadily into an armchair, mumbled something now and again, more and more slowly, like a piece of clockwork running down.

Jakkie remained slumped with his head on his arms. After a while he no longer looked up.

You looked at the head, the shape of it exactly like Jak's, the unshaven cheek of the strange young man, your son, amongst the dishes of food and the dirty plates, his lips muttering in the salt through which the spilt wine was starting to seep pinkly. You looked at Agaat whose eyes rolled slowly from side to side like those of a chameleon without her turning her head an inch left or right. A fly settled on the cauliflower. Agaat flapped it away.

You remained sitting there, you and Agaat, long after the talking had ceased. There was only the ticking of the grandfather clock, the quarter strokes of two quarters, the bothersome fly around your heads. Then Agaat got up. She avoided your eyes, touched her cap to feel if it was properly settled.

Let's take them to their rooms, she said.

As if it were the most ordinary thing on earth.

You put your arms around them, under the arms, between you, down the passage, first one, then the other, got them to their beds, took off their shoes.

Was it later that night, or the following night, or only after the weekend that you tried to check, emptied out the tablets on your bedspread, tried to count them, the drops, the powders? But you couldn't remember how many of everything there was supposed to be. And in those weeks before the feast you were in any case taking more of everything. Agaat counted out your pills for you in the morning and put them out on your dressing table because you could sometimes not remember whether you'd taken them, so dosed yourself double in the evenings and then was too drained the next day to do anything.

Would she have gone so far as to doctor Jak and Jakkie's drinks? You didn't dare ask her. You were scared she'd say something about the letters. You went and checked in your handbag, in the carrier bags
in your wardrobe, to see whether there was perhaps one that you'd forgotten to post. The one, the ode on Grootmoedersdrift, you looked for that again, but you couldn't find it. You found nothing. You were scared. Suddenly it was important to be able to remember the smallest detail exactly. But you couldn't remember. Things had slipped in your memory. Had you let slip something, to Jak, to Jakkie, was it from that that Jak could make out that you'd read Agaat's letters? Or had Agaat brought it to their attention?

You remembered the diaries. After Jakkie joined the Defence Force you'd stopped keeping a diary. You collected the booklets in the top cupboard of the spare room where you'd pushed them in amongst the eiderdowns. You paged through a few. Could you perhaps have hidden some of Agaat's letters that you'd forgotten to post in them? Your eye fell here and there on what you'd written. What of any importance could anybody read into them?

That's what you thought but you weren't sure. Your handwriting struck you as strange, more upright, harder than you thought of yourself as writing. You tied the booklets up in piles with kitchen string. Your hands were trembling. You locked them in the sideboard with the other documents.

There you stood in the sitting room, shaky, after you'd locked up the books. The sideboard gleaming, darker than usual. The dining-table, cleared, glossy, with a vase of flowers on top. No sign of the meal earlier or of the discord. But the dining room felt ominous. Every familiar thing was, under its surface, at its core, as if charged with dynamite.

You felt somebody was looking at you, there where you were standing with the key of the sideboard in your hand, but the curtains were drawn, the back door was closed, there was nobody. Here it is now, you thought, the last link that's chafing through. Everything you lived for, everything that you built up, all the facades that you maintained, the whole lie that you lived. The last link.

The key was sweating in your hand.

At last you slapped it down on the table for all the world to see.

You went and sat on a chair in your room in the dark, a woman over an abyss, the coming of morning a ghastliness, the first thrush a deathly herald. Agaat bringing your coffee and saying nothing about your just sitting there in the previous night's clothes, just raising her eyebrows over the pills that she'd put out for you and that you'd not taken.

You were scared of her. More scared of her when she was right under your eyes than behind your back. You cringed away from the brisk pace at which she kept doing her work. It was as if she'd been beating you
with sticks, with irons, since the previous evening, and still now, the day of the feast. You couldn't believe it, the calm cheerful face she put on.

Till late that night she kept it up.

Till the flying in the aeroplane.

Only then could you breathe in an odd sort of way.

Then it was her turn to be beaten.

Was it the abominations of your own family that opened your eyes to the power or impotence branded on the faces, the whitewashed disgraces of the guests who started arriving in groups or pairs the following day? Was it the lack of sleep? The pills you hadn't taken? So that you, for the first time in how many years, were soberly and austerely aware of what was happening around you?

12 August 1985. You are cordially invited.

You suddenly saw everything so clearly through Jakkie's eyes, pe-eep squeak the wives, bu-urp croak the husbands, the high-pitched little-girl voices in which the women twittered, the coarse bravado of the men, the children insolent or timorous, the childminders, feigning docility, but already casting long glances towards leftovers in the kitchen, bread, fat, candles and cloths and soap and matches. A pillage it would be again, as always.

You saw yourself standing in the garden mirrors, in your red dress. You heard your voice warbling. You shook the hands, pressed your cheek against the powdery cheeks of the women, kissed the slobbery mouths of the men.

My mother is pathetic, they keep each other pathetic, the whole community. Jakkie's words of the previous day. Your child. Blood of your blood. Not impossible, surely, that his message had taken effect on you immediately. Brainwashing, another voice in you protested, that's how subversion and brainwashing operate.

Welcome, welcome to Grootmoedersdrift! you said again and again.

Clearly I'm stuck between two cycles of brainwashing, and me without my pills as well.

You looked at Jak and Jakkie, emboldened in their display by a need to make up for the previous evening. Both ashamed of their lack of memory, they tried to tell each other what a load of crap they'd talked. Agaat rubbed it in. The Alka Seltzer and the vitamins, the big can of orange juice and the pot of strong coffee that stood ready by their breakfast plates that morning.