Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [239]
Whenever there was a moment’s silence amongst the shrieking of engines and the commentary over the loudspeaker supplying the velocities and details of supersonic and subsonic engine capacities, Jak resumed his account to the bystanders. He gesticulated with his hands, bellowed into his audience’s ears to be heard above the noise.
You caught scraps of it.
. . . then I test his reaction time . . . stabiliser muscles . . . reflexes, eye-to-hand coordination . . . exceptionally fit . . . they whisk a man in those flight simulators so that for days he thinks he’s custard.
With an excuse of headache you got out of there and returned to the parking lot. You couldn’t remember where the car was parked. You started searching amongst the rows and rows of cars. Your shoes were hurting you but you couldn’t take them off on the hot tar. The hard roofs of the cars and their glass and their chrome and their sideview mirrors reflected into your eyes so that you couldn’t distinguish colours. You became aware of walking in circles, you couldn’t remember in which row you’d been and which not. After a while you became confused about the colour of your car. It was a silver-blue BMW but there were many silverish cars that at a distance looked like BMWs. Silver-grey, silver-green, silver-khaki. Then you went and stood on the top step of an electricity substation and tried to read the number plates as far as you could see. CBY, CEY, CA, CAT but no CCK. Still later you just peered through the windows of cars, through the windows of three, four cars at a time to see if you could spot somebody sitting. Sometimes you thought you saw Agaat’s cap. Then you went closer but it would turn out to be a hat, or one of those dogs with red lolling tongues that sway when you drive.
Nowhere was there any shade. As you brushed past the cars, the metal burnt you through your clothes so that time after time you started back, all the time the heat-glow from the car bodies radiated down on you, at short intervals there was the thunderous whistle of the grey needle-nosed fighter planes that sheared low over the roofs out of nowhere, and set the whole parking lot glittering and echoing before swooping away again into the blue, tilting their wings in precisely measured quarter turns, belly up, back up, perilously on the side-fins through the high masts of the loudspeakers and the wires and the towers.
Anti-aircraft avoidance nosedives below radar range for espionage photography of enemy positions, the commentary went, deafening from the loudspeaker trumpets.
This is what hell is like, you thought, this is the temperature, this is the sound of hell. Just so do you search there for someone you’ve lost.
Gaat! you wanted to scream, there in the deserted parking lot.
Gaat! to make her white cap suddenly materialise above the expanse of motor cars.
Here, Gaat, here! you’d call and wave your hands so that she’d come and fetch you. She’d see that you were in need but pretend that it was nothing.
That’s how you were used to doing one to the other.
You couldn’t find the car. You found the ablution block and felt heartened but not for long. It wasn’t the same one that you’d run into quickly that morning when you arrived. That had been a red-polished cement floor, not grey. Poor Agaat, you thought, where would she have found a place to pee?
Under the flat tin roof of the ablution it was oppressively hot. It smelt strongly of Jeyes Fluid, but at least it was in the shade. You could still hear the announcements on the loudspeakers, but they were muffled now.
In the gloom you rinsed your face and wrists again and again at the basin. The water was warm. You took off your shoes and stockings. The plasters on your heels were scrunched up. You dripped water onto your chafed feet and dried them with toilet paper. You wet your handkerchief and wiped your armpits and back under your dress, and underneath your bra, from above and below.
You lowered yourself against the wall until