Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [257]
Jak peered at you, his gaze unsteady with alcohol. Or what am I talking? MiIla my pilla oh so silla? Are you also saying nothing tonight?
You didn’t look up. Jak got up unsteadily from his chair and struck his breast.
It’s my tragedy this, Agaat. You’re standing there with your lip latched to your chin because you know, don’t you, that your history has already been written up for you, day and date. Who would ever think of one day telling my tale? It wouldn’t be for the mass market.
You two, you are the trashy novel, ladies’ fiction for the airport.
The women of Grootmoedersdrift!
Agaat Lourier and Milla Redelinghuys, a tale that will rend the heart of every mother! Deep, I tell you! The stone and the bat! The silenced minority, the last domestic trench, the aborted revolution, now on the shelves for the first time! Mother Smother and Maid Overpaid!
That evening late you went to sit in the garden. You wanted to think, you couldn’t understand what point it was that Jak was trying to make, whether he had a point. It must have been very late when you got up from the garden bench, a clear night, Orion had shifted across to the west already. The plovers called out in overflight, a broken scale, two notes, three notes, four. It was Easter and you could hear the new lambs bleating on the hills beyond the drift.
You wanted to go to your room through the stoep door. Jak’s light was on. You heard movement, a sound, you went back down the stairs and went and stood on a terrace further on and higher up from where you could see into his office. Just the central rod, the upper halves of the weights, as he lifted them, were visible for a moment, then they disappeared, jerkily, dangerously fast.
You climbed onto the stump of the cut-down fig tree under his window. His face was upside down. At this angle it looked like a mask. He was naked except for a truss of synthetic material around his waist. His chest was heaving, the sinews in his neck thin with straining, the muscles in his upper arms quivering. The weights were clearly too heavy. Between the grunts you heard other sounds. Only then could you make out the expression on his face. Tears down his cheeks. Bubbles of mucus under his nose.
You wanted to go in to him. I am part of this pain, you wanted to say to him, but you couldn’t. You leant your head against the window sill and listened till the sobs died down.
When it was still, you looked again. He was curled up there on the carpet. Around him the shiny rods and the round iron disks were scattered. His arms were around his head. There was a moth around the light, large loose shadows flapped in the room. From the gleam of the red midriff support you could see his breathing. He wasn’t sleeping. His jaws were moving as he muttered.
Jak’s tale.
Agaat’s tale.
Selvage and face.
You had eavesdropped on them both. The tales that were clenched back behind jawbones, those that were roared into the wind, into the reeds, into the blowing bluegum tatters, those that were broadcast through the chimneys, those that were distilled from the depths of the bottle, those that were declaimed on the dust roads of the dryland, those that were muttered into mouthpieces.
Was there somebody on the other side that day when you heard Agaat talking on the phone? Or had it been designed specially for your ears? How could you know? You had been her teacher.
You were standing behind the door in the kitchen where you knew she often stood listening when you were talking on the phone.
Yes, Jakkie, Agaat was saying, that’s not news to me, you know, I know, everybody knows your mother and your father, they’re not easy people, but we all have