Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [165]
Du meine Seele, du mein Herz Herz Herz Herz,
Du meine Wonn’, o du mein mein mein Schmerz,
Du meine Welt, in der in der in der in der ich lebe,
Mein Hi Hi Hi Himmel du, darein ich schwebe be be . . .
Was that when you saw Agaat standing in the door? Could you read her face? She was half in the shadows. You saw her eyes shine.
Go away! you signalled with your eyes, what are you doing here? Vanish!
She resisted you. There she was, in the middle of the night, perfectly pleated, cap and apron and all, reporting from the backyard. She was barefoot. With an unfathomable countenance she stood there, broom and scoop ready in hand, and listened out the last phrases of the song.
Du hebst mich liebend über mich,
Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich!
Soundlessly she approached and lifted the needle off the record, replaced it on its cradle.
How much had she heard? Had Jak heard her come in by the back door before you saw her?
Aha, the stage hand, Jak said, like a moth to the flame. He took one pace, stepped on a shard and swore, lifted his foot over his knee and removed a piece of glass.
On his way out he rolled the wine cooler towards Agaat.
Let the one foot not know what’s befallen the other, he said, please do see to it that she cleans it all up nicely for you here, Mrs de Wet, and kindly make sure that she puts on shoes, otherwise she’s liable also to tread on a splinter.
You remained sitting on the sofa with your head in your hands, listened to Agaat sweeping up the glass, packing away the records in the shelf and the music books in the lid of the piano stool, leaving by the back door, without a word.
That was the last time, you decided, that German music would land you in a farce in your own sitting room.
That was how you dismissed it. A farce.
What Jak said, all the terrible words, and what Agaat could have heard, that you banished from your thoughts.
But that was not the end of the German problems. The Simmentals were next and they came up for discussion two evenings later.
You could see all the time that Jak was upset about the night of the music, but it was too difficult to talk about it. And there was Agaat’s presence, whiter than snow spotlessly whitewashed and mockingly correct and attentive. You certainly didn’t want to add fuel to her flame.
How did it begin? It was before supper even, when you remarked in the bathroom that you were tired. All day long you’d helped with the spraying against fruit-fly in the old orchard and afterwards saw to it that the anchor-poles were treated properly with rust-repellent undercoat and silver paint and that the young ewes were dipped against blowfly, all the absolutely essential maintenance on the farm of which Jak took very little notice.
Tired! he shouted from under the shower, it’s more than tiredness that’s wrong with you, you’re not all there, that’s what, it’s work, work, work as if you’re being driven by the devil and it must be this and not that, all the time with your melancholy mug and the whingeing and the whining, help me here, help me there, I can’t do everything on my own. And when midnight strikes, then you’re transfigured into the great seductress, half-naked tarted up with your wine and your candles and your stupid music, and keep me from sleep, what’s the matter with you? Do you think you’re Marilyn Monroe on a Texas ranch?
You looked at the sinewy muscles of his arms as he dried himself. Something about his hard body, something about the emaciated appearance of his ankles and wrists disturbed you, as if his joints were under extreme pressure.
It’s because there’s always too much happening on the farm, he said, this is not a damned experimental farm.
You knew where this was heading. That was always his defence when you pointed out on your statements how much money was being wasted on Grootmoedersdrift, through sheer neglect, through the wrong purchases, through cattle diseases that could have been prevented with the right care. He got angry when you brought it to his attention, the proof of squandering. The seeder with the disks instead of