Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [217]
Is that what’s become of my paradise here this side of the Tradouw? you thought.
Is that why you wanted to create the garden? Was that your response to the war stories with which Jak entertained Agaat evening after evening? A spell, a safeguard against the distant war and its hurt? Or to gain Agaat for yourself? To win back something of your dream?
You steeled yourself, went in to Jak at night, lay down next to him on his divan in his stoep room, satisfied him while he was half asleep.
What is all this, the stories of keening engines and missiles and explosions and blood and smoke and disembodied limbs and blackened ruins? you asked him after he had come, softly, persuasively, as one would talk to an upset child, so that he would answer you half in a daze, so that you could get the truth out of him.
I know you’re scared, just like me, you said, I know you’re worried. Who do you want to punish with such premonitions? What do you want to achieve by it? After all, you love him, he’s our son, why do you make him out to be one who sows destruction and death? With whom are you angry? Of whom are you afraid?
For a long time you listened by his mouth, to what he would say.
Our minerals, the white man’s future, he mumbled, the terrorists, we must prepare ourselves spiritually against the enemy, there are sacrifices to be made ...
Jak, that’s not what I’m asking, you said, that I can hear on the television any day that I have a mind to. Jakkie’s your child, he’s the future. For the sake of what exactly do you want to sacrifice him?
He defends the borders, Jak said, that’s what we whites should have done from the start in this country. He’s obeying orders, and fortunately it’s no longer your and your handmaiden’s orders.
You’re fighting against me, you said, you won the child over to your side and now you’re inciting Agaat against me as well with your blood-thirsty talk.
If the people at home weaken, it’s bad for the morale of the men on the border, Milla, you can support him by showing a bit more fighting spirit instead of taking to your room on any pretext. Why don’t you join the Southern Cross and do something useful for the war?
A paradise, you whispered, your head on his chest, that’s what you promised me, do you remember? Long ago. A flower garden without equal. Let’s make a garden for Jakkie, he won’t always want to fly jet fighters. He’ll come home one day, and then we can show it to him, a sign of . . . a sign . . .
You couldn’t say it, of what it was supposed to be a sign.
Go ahead, he mumbled, make your garden, you do just what you want to in any case.
You went out onto the stoep. The sweet clove smell of carnations was in the air, the intoxication of the hedge full of white moonflowers. There had always been a garden on Grootmoedersdrift, in summer always a show of hydrangeas and agapanthus, but you wanted more than a higgledy-piggledy farm garden, you wanted to create a bower of beauty, on a few hectares, a park in which you could lose yourself, with arcades of rambling roses and round ponds with fountains, garden rooms such as you’d seen in the magazines, with laid-out paths and boxwood hedges and vantage points, with mixed beds throbbing with larkspur and poppies, striking accent plants, conifers and flaxes, and flowering trees and shrubs in all seasons. Formal of design you wanted the garden to be, but informally planted. Like a story you wanted it, a fragrant visitable book full of details forming part of a pattern so subtle that one would be able to trace it only after a while. That’s how you wanted your garden to be, a composition, a sonata with theme and developments and repetitions in varying keys, something that would form the jewel in the crown of Grootmoedersdrift farm.
Jak grumbled about money when he saw you were in earnest.
You brandished in front of his face the quotation for a de-wrinkling operation that Agaat had found in one of his pockets.
Thousands of rands! It’s your vanity that will