Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [139]
Perhaps it was for yourself as well. You missed music, suddenly, which could always console you, bring you closer to yourself, make you feel closer to everything and everybody, but what had remained of your music in the midst of all the sickness and catastrophe?
Down there in the heat of the midday sun where the two of you were sitting on your knees by the groaning man with the thorns under your knees, and your and Agaat’s hands that touched each other as you passed on and received the scissors and bandages to and from each other, there everything suddenly felt too much for you.
The ambiguity of the place, your farm, where you were passing your days, the destitution of the people around you, your inability to act rightly and justly, the catastrophes that beset you day after day, the eternal squabbles with Jak, your child who with the new fine grip of his little fingers was picking lucerne stems, and around whose head all these things raged without his understanding any of it yet. He’d start crying in a certain manner when the voices were raised, got a fright when the doors slammed, his little face was concerned when tension or crises brewed. How could you protect him against it all?
Your tears dripped on the man’s face.
Agaat wiped them.
You tied the tarpaulin between the tractor and the baler to cast some shade over him. He had to lie right there until the doctor arrived, you agreed. You wouldn’t pick him up or turn him in case he had a serious back injury. His foot you wanted nothing to do with. It didn’t look like a foot any longer.
How did that day ever come to an end? How in heaven’s name did you manage after all that to sit down together at one table and eat?
You looked at Jak’s face as he sat there glaring at you. You remember the feeling, a sort of sickly equanimity took possession of you. His face was that of a stranger. How had you not at the beginning yearned to share something of your sensations and your intimate perceptions, something of the difficulty of the decisions and concerns of the farm with him? But never could you penetrate his resistance.
Jak, you said, let’s give it up and go to bed, everything’s in any case under control again, as well and as badly as possible.
That was when Gaat came in again. She had awaited her opportunity. You could always hear her calculating her entrance. Her footsteps were soft, for the first time that day.
Is the child still not in bed? you asked when she stood there again with Jakkie on her arm, in the heavy silence that hung suspended between you and Jak.
She put the child down next to the sideboard whose drawers he opened every day, the one with his favourite handles. He pulled himself up by it immediately.
She went and crouched a few paces further diagonally behind him. Jakkie swivelled back his neck. First to one side and then the other, his mouth a rosebud as Agaat had taught him.
Come, she said, come to Gaat. She held out her arms.
Terrifyingly, he turned around. The little hand let go of the handle, the first wobbling solo stance it was.
Come, said Agaat, show your father-him how well you can walk already.
His little face broke into one radiant laugh.
’Alk, he said.
Yes, walk, Agaat said, walk walk walk!
And there it was, the unmistakable independent sequential first steps.
With the last steps he let himself fall, crowing with laughter, into his nêne’s arms. She got up with him, shook him up onto her hip, laughing into his eyes.
Pa’s little bull, Jak said, and opened his arms to receive him from her.
1 October 1964
They disappear like mice nowadays. Only have to take turn away once & to call when I miss them & then I know it’s too late for searching they want to be GONE. Wind & cloud they are together fern & water. Long hours together & full of secrets. Something about it makes me anxious. They’re chronically there around the drift & the dam or they hide in the forest. A. can’t swim & there are still baboons & leopards in the kloofs & A. with only one good hand & Jakkie not