Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [214]
But as your eyes wandered over the densely packed lines, it was mainly the loving that you discerned, that was undiminished. It was in her descriptions. The jackal so delicately sniffing at the twig, its wide green eye in the night, as it approaches the yard with plans of its own. It was in the specific selection of things that she named. The three pink eggs of the little nightjar on the footpath to the old orchard. The way in which she wrote up the tiniest impressions, struck you. A love letter compared to yours. What would the Defence Force censorship make of it, you wondered. Like encrypted writing it would surely seem to them, like some code or other.
Your own letter was in your handbag. On the slender side. What you had to report was really rather meagre against Agaat’s epistle.
She held forth on everything that happened on the farm or didn’t happen. A chronicle. With wetted finger you counted, thirty pages, all in the precise upright handwriting she’d taught herself. You were amazed at the grasp she had of everything, from piss-ups amongst the farm workers to the service schedule of farm vehicles and the number of bales of wool, the variation in the quality of the milk and the cream in the spring and the fall, the treatment of the wheat seed against fungus. A record keeper’s statistics. She predicted the rains for Jakkie—a fine grey mizzle in the early morning just enough to make the eels stick out their noses—and guessed the wind for the following week for him and estimated the surge in the mountain streams and rivers for him with the naked eye and compared it with the average of the seasons. As if the farm belonged to him and to her.
What could you shore up against that? Against the number of cows covered, the report on the first signs of nasal bot among the sheep? What she left out, were the dreadful daily quarrels between you and Jak and the swearing and the tears. To judge by Agaat’s letter the Grootmoedersdrift homestead was a model of peace and harmony.
Why did it infuriate you so immoderately that day next to the road? The prettification to which every paragraph bore witness, was in the best possible taste. You couldn’t have done it better yourself.
You read the whole thing. At the end, for a whole paragraph, she asked questions, intimate questions from the nêne of old. What do they give you to eat there in the mess? Do you see meat in those army stews? Do you sleep warm enough? Is your pillow filled properly? Are your superiors well disposed towards you? Are you healthy? Are you safe? Do your subordinates listen to your commands? Are you getting used yet to taking off, to the blow to the heart and the horse rearing up? (rein it in) Do your ears still close up when you come down? (chew a dried peach) When are you coming home again?
The disquiet that was also in your and Jak’s hearts, she formulated as: I pray for your blessed and kept return from the distant skies.
It was herself she was comforting with the quince-mousse dessert she was thinking up for him, the roast of hare in pomegranate sauce that she would place steaming before him.
You wanted to read the letter again, you put it back into your handbag. Agaat’s blue Croxley envelopes you usually licked, and pressed closed again as best you might, asked at the post office for a bit of sticky tape. Your transgressions you trusted would be covered by the far more visible and sanctioned incursions of the military security that according to Jakkie opened and stamped everything. But this letter you didn’t want to let go, there was a tenderness and an obsession to these formulations after which you hungered.
Jak had his own formulae in which to clothe this new situation for himself.
How is Pa’s soldier? he’d ask on the phone when Jakkie phoned.
You listened in on the second phone. Jakkie could give him answers pertaining to his number of logged flying hours, the sensation of breaking through the sound barrier, the training with the ejector seat in the simulator.
He was a body of potentials for his father, a model of endurance, of physical