Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [261]
You watched her, her gestures, her phrases, her gaze. She was a whole compilation of you, she contained you within her, she was the arena in which the two of you wrestled with yourselves.
That was all that she could be, from the beginning.
Your archive.
Without her you and Jak would have known nothing of yourselves. She was your parliament, your hall of mirrors.
What must it feel like to be Agaat? How could you ever find that out? Would you be able to figure out what she was saying if she could explain it?
She would have to explicate it in a language other than the tongue you had taught her.
How would you understand her then? Who would interpret for her?
Privately you thought if the new heaven and the new earth were to be an empty, light place without discord or misunderstanding, then you would in spite of everything prefer life on Grootmoedersdrift with Agaat to beatitude, and surrounding you, instead of the heavenly void, the mountains and rivers and humped hills of the Overberg. And you would between yourselves devise an adequate language with rugged musical words in which you could argue and find each other. The language of reed and rushes. For, you thought, what would be the joy of finding each other without having been lost to each other?
Only when Agaat was present, in those last weeks before the feast, could you talk and could Jak talk, could you speak normal sentences to each other.
Was it in this time that Jak without any explanation came to sleep in your bed a few nights? Daddy-like in his pyjamas, complete with his glasses and book?
It was in spite of himself, you thought. And because he knew that it was too late. To seek consolation against the knowledge. That’s why he came, towards bedtime, with his pillows and his glass of water.
Neither of you made any overtures to the other. Each occupied a side of the bed. He slept quietly, you could hardly feel his heat and his weight. Like a husk you thought, a dry membrane. In the morning when you woke up, he was gone.
When Agaat wasn’t present, when you were alone together, you endured each other wordlessly. When in the evenings she drew the kitchen door shut, after she’d rinsed your teacups, and you heard her talking to the dogs, heard her enter the outside room, then it was a consolation for the two of you, where you were left behind under the shaded light of the table lamps in the sitting room, to know that she would be at her post the following morning, and that she would be there when Jakkie arrived and that she would help mediate his departure.
His departure! You didn’t want to consider it.
Where did he want to go? You could see that it upset Jak terribly.
You couldn’t talk to each other about it. Together you brushed your teeth and had your baths in the bathroom, until at last one turned the back on the other.
Jakkie’s mother and father, Agaat’s household, you thought, what are we more than that? And what have we made of them? But it was Agaat who was more urgent in your stocktaking.
What would Agaat do before going to bed, you lay there wondering wide-eyed in the dark next to Jak.
How would she get round to unbuttoning her uniform in front, and pulling out the pins of her cap and putting it down? Would she close her eyes first before looking at herself in the mirror without the white peak? And would she then stick her hands into the combed-flat mat of hair and massage her scalp? Would she work loose her hair until it stood in tag-locks around her head and would that then make her feel different? Look at herself in the mirror and smile? Fling her head back and laugh and stretch her arms above her head and roll her head on her shoulders so that the shadows of her hairdo slid over the linoleum like tumbleweed in a high wind?
Would something like that be possible in that outside room? Such