Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [284]
Was that what you heard? His face was half inside Agaat’s door. Then he pulled back his head and the sun fell on his brown curls, long, you thought, for an officer who’d only just been granted a pass.
Well, he said, his hands on the half-door, if I’m not even allowed to drink on my own birthday, and if I have to pronounce according to your precepts, you heard him say, then you, my dear Agaat, will get into the plane this evening so that I can show you what Grootmoedersdrift looks like from up there! A full moon has been requisitioned especially for you! Wonderland by Night!
Jak was coming from the direction of the sitting room, walked past you in the kitchen, out into the backyard. He heard what Jakkie was saying. They laughed together at the prospect of loading Agaat into the aeroplane. They were on their way to inspect the fuel supply and the landing strip.
Those were the movements of that morning, the voices, the sentences, the faces in doorways, the backs, the fronts, the standing still, the turning away, the walking past.
You waited as the feast continued into evening, the torches and the fires lit, the silhouettes of skewered animals rotating on spits. Grotesque it looked to you. And smelt too, the air dense with roasted flesh. Witches’ Sabbath. But who were the witches? Surely not these cordial effusive people who’d come from far and wide for your son’s birthday? Perhaps I’m psychotic, you thought, perhaps I’ve been dependent on my medication for so long that I degenerate into an enemy of the people if I skip a day. That’s what Jak always said: Take your pills, Milla, so that you can shut up while the men make war.
You tried in vain to vanquish the thoughts. But you kept looking out for the first stirrings of mischief as the great bowls of salad and the baskets of bread were carried in under Agaat’s command. You tried to keep a clear line of sight as you helped to serve the people, all the old acquaintances, and their children who were gathered there like replicas unto the third and the fourth generation. You couldn’t snap out of it. All the convivial noises sounded so false to you. Even Beatrice and Thys, your oldest friends, aroused your distrust. They were the dominee’s confidants. They would carry report of every guffaw that was too loud and every note that was false and every drop that was drunk in excess. To the nearest hundred rand they’d be able to estimate the cost of the whole thing. They’d be able to calculate the tithe that would be proportionate to the cost and submit it to the representative of God in the Swellendam district and he would in his own time and season come and claim it for the swelling of the church coffers. You could talk to them, to protect Agaat, to speak to Jak. You could try to talk to Dominee himself.
But what would they be able to do about it? About your presentiment that a slow explosion was blowing all of Grootmoedersdrift into hundreds of shards and chunks? You were alone with the sensation. You tried to shake it off, had coffee brought to you to bring you to your senses. Lack of sleep, you thought.
There were the sallow Dieners of Vreugdevol with their smooth blue-black hair, pure Malay, you realised for the first time. Pass for white, whatever that might mean here on the other side of Sir Lowry’s Pass. The heads were bowed low over the plates, the gills shone as they peered at each other around the white wrought-iron table, as if they were engaged in an eating contest. You went across to them to try to rid yourself of the odd perspective, but they were so engrossed in stuffing themselves, they hardly greeted you.
So then for want of something more constructive to do you took a jug of ice to the Froneman table. For there wife and children with woe-begone eyes were sucking away at lukewarm glasses of cooldrink under the stern gaze of their teetotal father.
Ice, you said, try a bit of ice, it makes everything taste better.
Like somebody from the