Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [162]
Razor in the air she stands and looks at the blood trickling a crooked little line through the lather, blotting the soapiness pink before the rivulet divides and drips onto the sheet on either side of my calf.
Yes, look, Agaat. Now you’ll just have to look well. Because there you have what you’ve been looking for. It’s only blood that’s inside me. Replete I still am with it. Heavy and dense I am with blood. And that is all that will flow from me if you make a hole in me. Blood! No ready-made pictures to make your skin crawl, nor a tent full of entertainment, that thing on my shin is no peep-hole of a kaleidoscope in which you can make glass fragments tinkle in pretty patterns. The costumes are your brainwave. The orchestra. The stage set you carted in here. It’s behind your curtains that the play is waiting to commence. You will have to produce the lines. Because the void is in you.
The darkened coulisses.
Like gills they drape layer upon layer.
I hear the effort of your breathing.
Rippling.
Was it after that night, the night that everything changed between you?
Was it two days after that that Jak broke down?
That night, the night that elicited it all, that was in the time when you started fighting anew for your marriage, when Jakkie was starting to grow up and a playmate appeared at table from time to time. With all your might you tried to cultivate a more loving manner, for a year or more you’d consciously tried to look more kindly on Jak, also for Jakkie’s sake. He was quick to pick up tension between the two of you and then he would withdraw himself from everybody and everything except Agaat. Sensitive, just like you, was the child, even though in appearance he was Jak’s child in every respect. To and fro you could gaze at that time, at your husband at your child and back again. With Agaat following every movement of your eyes.
There is something to you, there must be something in there, you thought when you looked at Jak’s face. You refused afresh to accept that he was just a pretty shell. Late at night when you were on your own, you tried to get yourself in the mood with wine, with your old pieces of sheet music, accompaniments, almost forgotten, that you dug up out of the piano stool and played to yourself haltingly and sang to, after the example of the great singers on Pa’s old records, Ferrier, Flagstadt, Schwarzkopf. So, somewhat mellowed, you managed to go to Jak in his stoep room more regularly. You switched on his bedside lamp because you wanted him to look at you, at the new black nightgowns that you had ordered by post to save yourself embarrassment in the shops in town. Every time he had swept the switch back with the flat of his hand. And every time it had been a few minutes’ scuffle in the dark, without a word or a caress.
But you didn’t want to give up. You were alone, it felt worse in your forties than ever before. Not that Jak ever had a wandering eye as far as you were aware. But nor did he have an eye for you any more.
What year was it that night? Sixty-nine? Or was it nineteen seventy already, seventy-one?
It was an evening in early summer, October, you could hear the rushing of the drift, full after a good winter. You were standing on the stoep after everybody had gone to bed and you thought, Milla, is this what your life has come to? Your only child in a conspiracy of games and secret language with his nursemaid, your husband estranged from you in his own wing on the stoep. What have you retained of it all? Of your education, your music, your books? Only Grootmoedersdrift? And what good did it do you? All the struggling to get the farming going smoothly, only then to be left feeling so loveless and forlorn?
Just like your father, you thought. And just like your mother.
You caressed your own body. What a waste, you thought, what a pity.
You wouldn’t give in. You were different from her, different from them. You would make an extra effort.
That night it was.
You went and picked a bunch of blue larkspur and yellow fennel branches in the garden and arranged