Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [216]
But it was the scene there in the dining room that really irked you, the scene with Jak and Agaat, she standing opposite him on the other side of the table, her hands on the back of the chair, half of her face in shadow. Jak telling tales of bombed-out enemy positions, of smoking Migs exploding in fireballs. Was she flattered to serve as audience to the fantasies of the baas?
It sickened you. You tried to keep yourself going with hard work, but then there was always the apprehension, the suspicion in those years, the late seventies, early eighties.
You went to see the doctor. He prescribed a stronger tranquilliser, better sleeping draughts. That helped, but it made you feel as if you were only half alive. Agaat checked your consumption closely. She was particularly interested in your faints, in the weakness that sometimes overcame you in the middle of wool-classing or during the stamping of the wool bales. Exaggeratedly solicitous she’d be then. Irony, no, sarcasm was in the crook of the elbow of the strong arm she offered to accompany you to your room.
After such an episode, after she’d attended to you in your room, she could go missing for hours. Stay with me, Agaat, you asked, but she closed the curtains. Stay with me, I feel scared, you said, but she remained standing there for just a moment, in the twilit room, with her hands folded under her breasts, her white cap, her white apron like nurse’s clothing, before walking out tchi-tchi on her thick-soled school shoes.
Was it one late afternoon that you woke up after such a collapse, after a dream that she had run off, that you went out? You had to look very closely, with the binoculars. She was walking with her head held high. From far away you could make that out. Unimpeachable in her solid body with her even tread she approached, unswervingly, as if she were in a play. This time she wasn’t on the koppie in front of the house where she always, in full silhouette, looked larger than she really was. She was approaching along the footpath in the dryland through the twilit wheatfields, her white cap like a prow above the stalks of wheat.
After half an hour she came in by the back door. All innocence, a castaway lamb under her arm, a story about a hare that had ended up in the jackal trap, a basket of lay-away eggs. That’s the way it always was.
A report of a gate lying wide open, of an empty drinking trough, of a windmill that doesn’t cast, of another kerbstone washed away from the bridge over the drift, of a plume of smoke in the poplar forest. But you knew that there was much more than met the eye to her walks. That evening again, when she’d brought in the food for you, she waited, emphatically and intransigently, for you to tell Jak what she’d found, noticed, suspected. And then she listened, expressionlessly, because the actual information you couldn’t communicate. You didn’t know what it was.
You shut your ears to your own voice pronouncing the deceitful words. You screamed at Agaat.
Stop staring at me as if I’m false! What have I done to you? What do you want me to say?
You slammed your fists on the table. Your glass broke. You put your hand in your mouth, you wanted to pluck out your tongue.
Jak looked at you askance.
My toastmistress, he said, lifted his glass, and carried on eating.
Agaat picked up the shards and took you to your room. She made you take your medicine and covered you with blankets, switched on the night-light by your bed. You listened to her serving Jak’s dessert and coffee, clearing up, closing the windows of the living room for the night.
Those sounds, that silence in which Agaat at length ate her evening meal behind a closed kitchen door, the back door that she pulled shut and locked behind her, the slamming of the screen door, the scuffing of the door of the outside room, all those black sounds to which you were listening