Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [194]
From then on, from 1971 on, he tried to take the child out of your hands, out of Agaat’s hands. First he had to go to boarding school in Heidelberg. And then one fine day you woke up to find that everything had been arranged for Jakkie to go to Paul Roos from Standard Seven. Science and maths he had to study, languages and music didn’t pay the rent, and he didn’t want his son to squander his life on a farm one day as he, Jak, had done.
That fire, was it in 1976? Jakkie in Standard Eight? He’d be getting a lift home for the Easter break. The rains stayed away. Warm autumn weather, gusty south-easter, everything crackling with drought, the river just about empty. Perfect conditions for a veld fire.
You were concerned about water for the sheep, about the lambs on the dry stubble-fields. About the sheep-oats that had germinated too late on account of the unusual drought in December. You were preparing to cart dry feed to the mangers. You didn’t want to drive the sheep into the cattle’s grass pasture because that was also rather meagre for the season. The river was too low for much irrigation. You wanted all hands on the farm to help with the lamb birthing. The ewes were weaker than previous years, one of the herds not yet altogether in condition after the acidosis poisoning the previous November. Ate too many loose grains of wheat on the harvested field.
And guess who had driven them in there?
Guess who first saw that they had all lain down?
Guess who then had to doctor them?
It was beginning to seem as if events were unfolding according to a design on Grootmoedersdrift.
In whose plan were you all?
What was being made clear to you?
You were all blind. You were blind. Your mouth was dry from tranquillisers. You stared at these things, and at the faces around you, at your own face in the mirror, but nothing would surrender their secrets. You knew one part of the reasons, the people around you another part. And everybody tried to solve the riddle for himself in his solitude.
That Easter, it was a critical time. You would have preferred Jakkie and Jak to stay on the farm and help look after it. After all, it was in the interests of all of you, you felt. Why did you always have to ask for support, plead for help?
Was it because of the nature of mixed farming that there was always too much to do, and would you really have to change it all if you wanted things to run more smoothly? Was Jak right about that?
How would you have to dismantle such a complex concern and reassemble it differently, with fewer components and fewer troublesome details to attend to? Who would help you to think up and plan such an upheaval?
And what would the farm look like then? Like green wheatfields? A monotonous summer? A monoculture with a general impoverishment?
That afternoon before Jakkie’s arrival. Agaat in the kitchen preparing food. Jak on the stoep with the mountaineering equipment. You in your room with your diary. That’s right, it was the Easter break 1976, you had just started a new booklet.
Writing had in any case increasingly become your way of waiting to see what would happen next. Through writing you wanted to get a grip on your times and days on Grootmoedersdrift, to scrunch up and make palpable the hours, the fleeting grain of things in your hastily scribbled sentences, connecting cause and effect in the stream of events. At least then you could later turn the pages of the diaries, forward and back, and see: This happened before that, and this and that were the first signs of a catastrophe that you wrote up only much later, and this and that were simultaneously requiring attention and not without connection, even though the connection was evident only later.
That afternoon when Jakkie was due to arrive, you were sitting and writing about your farming worries. And about how you were all waiting, each