Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [256]
During the day she drove them, along with the extra labourers, men and women that Jak had allocated to her and paid to beautify the garden for the feast.
Single-handedly he transported everything she needed by lorry: soil, bark and straw for the rose gardens, fertiliser and new trees and shrubs. He went to Cape Town and bought dozens of garden torches and lanterns. He ordered a marquee tent with smart wrought-iron tables and chairs from a hiring-supply company and had wood chopped and dry-piled and had new spits welded and new braai areas built.
For the guests who’d be staying over, he hired luxury sleeping-tents with mosquito netting and bathrooms, even built a sauna down by the dam.
Jak helped Agaat like a diligent labourer. He cast himself as her foreman. His irony was bitter and full of loathing, his obedience a grotesque display directed at you. You saw the labourers laugh when Jak trotted off to execute Agaat’s instructions.
She accompanied Jak to the lands to select and brand the slaughter-animals and he went and assembled extra slaughter-staff and kitchen help for the feast according to her specifications. They had the outbuildings painted and the yard tidied up.
Jak had a landing strip graded. He would rent a two-seater plane so that Jakkie could treat his friends to pleasure flips during the festivities.
He made a feint of reporting the progress with the preparations to you in the evenings, while Agaat stood by taciturn. The drunker he got, the more he wanted Agaat to play along.
Didn’t he realise that Agaat was playing her own game with you?
She said not a word.
If then at length he lost his temper, he inveighed against both of you.
Ag, how stupid of me to think that the slave-girl could ever really take the master’s part! After all, the slave-girl is in thrall to the mistress. They’re you might say each other’s extension cord. Closed circuit.
Did Jak himself understand that much about everything? At times you got that impression, as on the evening when he filled three glasses with wine and took sips from all three, kept decanting wine from one to the other.
Come Milla, he said, don’t you think it’s time for a little poem? What’s that one that you were always so fond of quoting to me? Love is the empty glass. And then? Bitter? Dark? That holds the hollow heart? Is that how it goes?
But then, you’re Siamese twins, aren’t you, you two, can’t the two of you recite it for me? Isn’t that how your joint unholy history started? With your nonsense-rhymes, not so? There was a woolly, wonderfully, with a paw, like a claw.
Jak knocked over the gravy boat.
Agaat cleaned up without twitching a muscle, as if these were gestures and a text that she knew. As if Jak were an actor whose words she was rehearsing with him to check that he was word-perfect.
How does the rest of it go, Agaat? Don’t you remember it any more, your good Afrikaner education? Jak asked. Agaat just looked at him, the cloth with which she was mopping up the gravy in her hand.
Yes, Gaat, what are you staring at me like that for? Or are you perhaps drinking in my every word? But your mouth is zipped up of course! Talking is the baas’s responsibility high and dry here on his little box. You and your miesies, you can put on the nappy and cook the pumpkin and cut the roup from a chicken’s tongue, but when it