Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [115]
The Sunday morning.
Ai, the ordinary little old songs, and then he did have such a beautiful voice, the child. Would it be him that she wants to ring? A last chance to come?
When he wrote to say he was starting to study all over again, I wrote back saying but surely there’s a department of Afrikaans cultural history at Stellenbosch, isn’t there? And then in his next letter he delivered himself of a whole lot of stuff about how he wasn’t a Patriomanic Oxwagonologist, but an anthropologist, and that meant that it was the rubbish bins of the worthy professorial Brethren of Stellenbosch, not their ideas, that he had to scrutinise under a magnifying glass. The ideas, he wrote, spoke for themselves, they flared to high heaven like pillars of fire in the desert, they couldn’t be missed by a deaf-and-dumb dog with a blocked nose.
It upset me, that the child could now turn so sharply against his own people. Being radical surely didn’t oblige you to become disrespectful. It wouldn’t have been wise of me to react at that stage. Those were his refractory years. Not that he ever fitted in altogether. Even as a child always half-apart, never really interested in his peers, tied to Agaat’s apron strings here on the farm. Later, too, not much time or taste for the antics of his fellow-students or for the other officers in the Defence Force. Herd animals, he said, always had to have a bell-wether and a scapegoat, without those they couldn’t function.
Nowadays he sounds more concerned. Not about the headline news, he writes, but about ‘the little grey bushes’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Surely one can’t live with so little faith in the world?
He writes but rarely. When he writes to Agaat, she no longer shows it to me. Not that she ever really showed his letters, she just read out from them, quoted what she wanted to.
There was just the one letter, the one that she had to show us, Jak and me, the first one after he vanished. Of that I saw only the first line. And when I saw it again, it was so besmeared with blood that the pages were stuck together.
She would supposedly still read it to me. Nothing came of that. More than a year later only did Jakkie report on everything. Rather synoptically. No reference to that first confession and plea.
Did we bring him up wrongly?
Can’t have been too wrongly, for he has a job and a house and a will of his own.
It’s Agaat who’s been most badly hurt. She pines for him, I can see it, when she gazes out of the door in a certain way and closes her eyes for a moment, or, sometimes at night, when the doors here are thrown open and she lowers her embroidery and turns her head askance to listen, her cap tilted at an angle like a radar dish.
Does she want to phone him this morning? Perhaps she’s struggling with the dialling codes for overseas. Perhaps she wants to pretend to be phoning him, for my sake. Perhaps she’s trying to think what she’d better say then, how she should say it, for the benefit of my listening ears.
But I know what her face looks like when she thinks she’s going to be talking to Jakkie.
Perhaps it’s the undertaker, rather, that she wants to phone. For a preview. Perhaps she hopes that it will encourage me, such a quantity surveyor’s assessment. Just as well that I’ve been deprived of speech.
Of the friends it’s only Beatrice that Agaat still allows to see me, if she should want to, that is. After that conversation in Jak’s office she’s rather withdrawn herself from me. Scared of her own emotions. Only now do I realise how widespread it must be. Blunted men, suck-weary women. Only death can still whet their appetites.
Agaat keeps their visits brief since she’s realised it. Gives them tea in the sitting room, lets them greet in the doorway, not a step closer, takes them out again. Closes the front door on their backs. Sometimes they slip through, down the passage. The inquisitive mainly, the spiteful attracted to the bed of affliction.
Such vanity, it all seems from here. The endless stream of visitors that I had here at one stage. Until Agaat decided that