Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [277]
I’m no longer scared of him, Gaat, for that I’ve almost seen my arse too many times in the service of his pathetic National Party. Fucking Mirages that fuck out, fucking missiles around my ears. Killed hundreds of people, more than I’ll ever know. Jesus, what a disgrace! How must I live with it for the rest of my life? I’m ashamed of it, that it happened to me, that I didn’t see it sooner. Always just: You’ll do what I tell you, chappie, salute, general! I puke of it, of this pathetic lot who tell themselves they’ve been placed here on the southernmost tip with a purpose and they represent something grandiose in the procession of nations. O wide and sorrowful land blah blah blah with flag and Word and trumpet. It’s sick! Sick! It’s better that I go away before I do something rash. He’s pathetic, my father. My mother too, she’s pathetic. They keep each other pathetic, the two of them, with all their wealth and wisdom. The whole community here intoning their anthem, peeep, squeak the little wives, bu-urp croak the husbands, they with their stud farms breeding bulls for the abattoir and babies for the army, they with their church steeples and iron fists towering towards heaven. Who do they think they are? Blind and deaf against the whole world? How long must it still carry on? And their God, he’s one of them, half-a-head elevated above the bald pate of the local dominee, God Almighty, the Auditor of the Land Bank.
The orchard has ears.
That’s what Agaat said. You knew it was meant for you. You wormed away backwards and came to your feet carefully and walked back. You picked up a few oranges at random to have something in the pocket, a proof.
Pathetic, you thought, my child thinks I’m pathetic.
You went and changed into another dress. Nobody need know that you’d crawled on your stomach. On your back where the August sun had beaten down, it felt hot for a long time after, itchy all over the shoulders.
All the time that afternoon while Jak was taking Jakkie around on the farm to see his latest activities, you felt as if another tape was spooling in your head with commentary.
The bokbaai vygies a feverish rash, the Namaqualand daisies a knee-high blaze. The whole garden an indictment, wide and sorrowful.
Jakkie stood gazing at it.
Gaat’s work, you said.
Gaat’s and mine, Jak said. Your mother, don’t you know, had fainting fits for months on end. She went and fell into the ditch that evening after your medal parade. Agaat must have told you. On top of a rotten cow. Got such a fright she was all aquiver.
Jak held open the door of the new abattoir for Jakkie. He’d always been squeamish, he said, about the slaughtering on the block, the old axes and the knives at the draining-gutter under the bluegums, where the dogs lick, where the gauze cage sways in the wind.
An abattoir was an asset on Grootmoedersdrift, he said, solidly built, complete with shiny steel surfaces, neon lights, completely automated bearing-surfaces, industrial refrigeration plants. Jak tapped against the wall, stroked the shiny surfaces with the back of his hand.
Pale in the light of the cooler, in deep marinading dishes, lay the sheep and the suckling pigs with their legs tied together. Agaat had already threaded them along the spine on the central braai rods for the spit-braai the following day.
You stood back out of the cool-room. The dull light over the rumps, the ribs and legs, the headlessness, the disgrace.
You’d stood next to Agaat the day when the installers came to demonstrate the machinery. You couldn’t watch, the fear of the animals between the railings of the isolation pen, the swinging up onto the moving hook of the living animal, the blood in the drainage chutes, the screaming saw-blade.
See, now somebody with one hand can slaughter all on her own, Jak had shouted at her above the noise.
Jak took a sheep’s head out of the cooler, held it up by the ears before Jakkie. The head from the slaughter, belonging to Dawid and company, that they’d not collected yet. He slotted the blade into the grooves with