Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [180]
You’d phoned rescue teams earlier in the week already and explained Jak and Jakkie’s route to them. You’d found out about helicopters at Swellengrebel aerodrome. The more you thought about it the more you reproached yourself for not objecting more vehemently. It was ill-considered, altogether 80 kilometres over mountaintops and kloofs and through rivers. You couldn’t believe that you’d permitted it.
Take more people along, take a radio, you had pleaded two days before their departure. At the last moment, when you went to drop them off, you put a little mirror in Jak’s hand, offered to go and make appointments with farmers at the foot of the mountain to look for signals at a certain hour so that you would at least know where they were.
You want to be in a play, Milla, Jak had said, willy-nilly you must have a drama where there’s none, with yourself in the lead. Plus a banner headline: ‘Woman loses husband and only son in mountaineering tragedy’. The world as it is, is not enough for you, my wife. That’s your problem. You’re like the hungry cow in that children’s book of Jakkie’s. You bring misfortune down upon yourself, and upon me, upon us all here, it’s you who needs the mirror, not me.
He pressed it back into your hands. His eyes flickered. In the back seat Agaat and Jakkie sat and took it all in.
The Saturday, a week later, the dark morning of rain. You didn’t dare go look for Agaat in her room once again. All week while you were waiting, she was stony and taciturn, came and showed you the rainbow cloth once more, with an odd sentence added to it.
Break and be broken, she said, that is the law of life.
You knew better than to ask her what she meant.
Her other intentions were crystal-clear. She ordered you around with a list in her hand. You did what she said, you were too numbed with nerves to think straight. Blankets and towels and warm clothes she packed and thermos flasks of sweet black coffee. Barley water with sugar and salt such as she always gave to the diarrhoea babies down in the cottages. The first-aid chest. Extra bandages. Brandy. She made sandwiches, frikkadels, hard-boiled eggs, a bottle of preserved quinces, cookies, rice pudding, cinnamon sugar, sago pudding, custard.
They’ll be as hungry as wolves she said and then they must start with mushy foods first.
You regarded her actions. The mugs, the plates, the spoons that she packed in the basket. Three of each and her own enamel plate and mug.
What if they don’t come? you asked, what if you wait there all day till evening and they don’t turn up?
Oh God our help in ages past, Agaat said.
The tone of her voice had little to do with God, and her ‘our’ didn’t invite company.
She got Dawid to put the canopy on the bakkie and laid a single mattress in the back. You’d spend the night there if they didn’t turn up, she decided, you in the back and she in front. You’d have to wait there until they arrived. She had a bag of wood dragged up for a fire in case it should be necessary. You started trembling as you were loading the stuff in the half-light of dawn. You realised you were furious, more furious than you’d ever been in your life, at what Jak had done to you. But your fury was without expression, like a thin cord inside you it was. You couldn’t utter it, you would have screamed if you could, you would have cursed, but nothing issued from you. Agaat came and stood by you with one of your green pills in her palm and a glass of water.
Drink that, she said, you’ve got the proper heebie-jeebies.
What if . . . you began.
If me no ifs, Agaat said.
She was curt. You knew how she felt. You thought you knew. It would break