Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [282]
Then you’ll have something to write about, instead of the sentimental chirry-chirping of yours, one two buckle my shoe, onky-bonky here’s my donkey, pat-a-cake, as if you’re in a children’s book, not exactly top secrets that you’re sharing with your kleinbaas the traitor!
Jak sank unsteadily into an armchair, mumbled something now and again, more and more slowly, like a piece of clockwork running down.
Jakkie remained slumped with his head on his arms. After a while he no longer looked up.
You looked at the head, the shape of it exactly like Jak’s, the unshaven cheek of the strange young man, your son, amongst the dishes of food and the dirty plates, his lips muttering in the salt through which the spilt wine was starting to seep pinkly. You looked at Agaat whose eyes rolled slowly from side to side like those of a chameleon without her turning her head an inch left or right. A fly settled on the cauliflower. Agaat flapped it away.
You remained sitting there, you and Agaat, long after the talking had ceased. There was only the ticking of the grandfather clock, the quarter strokes of two quarters, the bothersome fly around your heads. Then Agaat got up. She avoided your eyes, touched her cap to feel if it was properly settled.
Let’s take them to their rooms, she said.
As if it were the most ordinary thing on earth.
You put your arms around them, under the arms, between you, down the passage, first one, then the other, got them to their beds, took off their shoes.
Was it later that night, or the following night, or only after the weekend that you tried to check, emptied out the tablets on your bedspread, tried to count them, the drops, the powders? But you couldn’t remember how many of everything there was supposed to be. And in those weeks before the feast you were in any case taking more of everything. Agaat counted out your pills for you in the morning and put them out on your dressing table because you could sometimes not remember whether you’d taken them, so dosed yourself double in the evenings and then was too drained the next day to do anything.
Would she have gone so far as to doctor Jak and Jakkie’s drinks? You didn’t dare ask her. You were scared she’d say something about the letters. You went and checked in your handbag, in the carrier bags in your wardrobe, to see whether there was perhaps one that you’d forgotten to post. The one, the ode on Grootmoedersdrift, you looked for that again, but you couldn’t find it. You found nothing. You were scared. Suddenly it was important to be able to remember the smallest detail exactly. But you couldn’t remember. Things had slipped in your memory. Had you let slip something, to Jak, to Jakkie, was it from that that Jak could make out that you’d read Agaat’s letters? Or had Agaat brought it to their attention?
You remembered the diaries. After Jakkie joined the Defence Force you’d stopped keeping a diary. You collected the booklets in the top cupboard of the spare room where you’d pushed them in amongst the eiderdowns. You paged through a few. Could you perhaps have hidden some of Agaat’s letters that you’d forgotten to post in them? Your eye fell here and there on what you’d written. What of any importance could anybody read into them?
That’s what you thought but you weren’t sure. Your handwriting struck you as strange, more upright, harder than you thought of yourself as writing. You tied the booklets up in piles with kitchen string. Your hands were trembling. You locked them in the sideboard with the other documents.
There you stood in the sitting room, shaky, after you’d locked up the books. The sideboard gleaming, darker than usual. The dining-table, cleared, glossy, with a vase of flowers on top. No sign of the meal earlier or of the discord. But the dining room felt ominous. Every familiar thing was, under its surface, at its core, as