Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [22]
Good, good, Agaat, watch my lips shut and open, then you imitate it, then you sound it for me, then you say ‘m’, then you say ‘map’, then you bring the sheaths out from the sideboard there, and then you take out the rolls and unfold them for me so that I can see where I am between heaven and earth, because my bed here is too small for me. My mouth is open, her mouth is open. Try once more. I can see your lips, Agaat, and I will signal when you move them correctly.
Suddenly I smell Agaat’s breath. Of sweet rooibos tea it savours, of an hour ago, of the enamel jug.
Agaat closes her mouth. Her hands press on mine.
Don’t go exciting yourself unnecessarily now, she says. She stands back. Cautiously.
Let’s go through our list, she says, then we see what it is that you want.
12 December 1947. The day before your wedding, that was when it happened the first time. Afterwards, the days after, the first weeks, you listened to music to calm yourself. You told yourself that Jak had just been panicky about the wedding, nervous about all the new responsibilities, scared of his mother-in-law.
And then you were nagging away at him as well. That’s how you tried to rationalise it to yourself. The thought of telling Beatrice you banished from your mind. Your father was the other possibility. The evening before your wedding he’d come to stand next to you and put his hand on your shoulder. I’m fretting for you, my child, he said, is something wrong? You looked into his face, grooved and emaciated with his disease. What would happen if you told him? He would do something about it immediately. He would tell Jak a few things straight out. And you couldn’t afford to lose Jak.
You so badly wanted the house quite ready before the great day, because the reception would be on Grootmoedersdrift. The garden was another matter. It was untidy and overgrown. For that you had great dreams, but they’d have to wait. There were more pressing matters. And in any case, you were sentimental about the old-fashioned plants growing there. You’d always want them there. The March lilies and the morning glory and the nasturtiums round the foot of the water tank, the unruly jasmine hedge that had climbed into the old guava trees and the black-eyed Susan, the old-fashioned purple bougainvillea that had colonised the side stoep, the stocks and the fragrant dwarf carnations, the tuberose. Looked at rightly, it was a paradise already.
Pa’s wedding present to the two of you was generous, a brand-new thatch roof for the old homestead, thatched by the foremost thatchers of Suurbraak, and a new floor with a spacious underfloor area with proper air vents broken into the foundations. For the sitting room Pa managed, on his last legs, to get hold of some yellow-wood beams from an old house being restored in Swellendam. The old-fashioned narrow knotty-pine slats he’d collected over the years so that there were enough when the floors had to be laid in the rest of the house. Ma got a whole team of Malays from the Hermityk to do the work. It was in their blood, she said, bricklaying and carpentry. A section of the stoep staircase that had crumbled away they built up neatly and fashioned air vents in the jerkin-head gables so that the new roof could air properly. The two little doves under the overhang of each gable, the secret adornment of which you’d been so fond ever since childhood, were touched up, so that if the afternoon sun was at the right angle, you could see them there, heads towards each other, cooing in white plaster. The front door they sanded down and painted green, and fitted an old copper doorknob and lynx-head knocker from Ma’s heirloom-trunk. They carted out all the rubbish from the cellars and dug the spaces deeper for storage. You can never have enough storage on a farm, said Ma. And Jak will probably want to keep his wine somewhere. She came herself to supervise the work on the cellars and sorted the stuff to be got rid of from that to be put in the storerooms behind the house. There was lots of furniture that you wanted to have fixed in time,