Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [291]
It was over as abruptly as it had started. Within an hour the hay barn was a black smoking shell. The people were standing around the yard in little groups, shocked sober, their clothes stained with mud and soot.
Where were Jak and Jakkie? You looked around, but you couldn’t see them among the assembled. Agaat struck the ploughshare. When everybody had assembled under the wild almond, she looked at you.
You thanked the people for their assistance and their presence at the feast.
I am sorry, you said, that it had to end like this.
Some of the older people came to look for Agaat with you to shake her hand, but she’d disappeared. She didn’t sleep in her room that night.
The next morning Jakkie was gone.
You heard doors slam in the night, were aware of car headlights sweeping over the yard, voices, but you were too heavy with your medication to get up. You thought you were dreaming. Did you hear the sideboard opening, tchick? closing, tchick? When you woke up, at ten o’clock the next morning, black scraps of burnt paper were swirling past the glazed stoep-door in front of your room.
You went to the kitchen. Jak was standing in front of Agaat. You pushed past him. She was holding one hand in the other. You went to Jakkie’s room. His suitcase was gone. His bed hadn’t been slept in.
First came the military police and then the security branch.
They questioned you and Jak about your political views. About what you knew of Jakkie’s attitude to politics, his feelings about the Angolan war and about his movements the last few months.
You both said that he’d always been only positive and correct and enthusiastic about his career in the Air Force.
They wouldn’t answer any of your questions.
They searched the house.
They found nothing.
When they’d finished, Agaat brought in tea. Not that you wanted to serve these people tea. It was she who wanted to see their faces. You knew she was standing in the kitchen eavesdropping on everything.
Whether you could provide the names of Jakkie’s confidants, they asked again and again.
You treated Agaat as if she’d been hired the day before. She behaved like a servant who came in once a week.
It’s in the national interest, said the officer, that you should immediately report every attempt on Jakkie’s part to make contact to the nearest police station, and that your failure to do so will make you accomplices.
To what? asked Jak.
It’s not possible to say at this stage, the chap replied, it could hinder the investigation.
The letter arrived a month later. Dawid had gone to collect the post in town and went to give the letter to Agaat in the backyard. You went to wait in the sitting room. It took half an hour. Then Agaat was standing in the doorway of the sitting room holding out the letter to you and saying: Read.
You read the first sentence.
Dear Gaat, by the time you get this letter I’ll have left the country, I asked somebody to post it for me in town once I’d gone, I hope it doesn’t get intercepted.
The handwriting looked different from Jakkie’s usual hand. Letters leaning forward and back at random, it must have been scribbled down in great haste.
Then Jak came in and grabbed it from your hands.
The two of you watched him reading it, his eyes racing over the lines. Jak turned white and then red and then he stuffed the letter into his pants pocket and stormed out.
You listened to him driving the car out of the carriage, hard in reverse, you saw him stopping in the mud-puddle at the gate, flinging open the gate and charging over the cattle grid so that the iron bars leapt up behind the wheels, the dogs barking in pursuit.
Agaat sat down. It was the first time, since her childhood, that she’d sat down like that with you in an easy chair in the sitting room.
But she didn’t sit back, she sat on the edge of the chair.
What does he write? I asked.
She didn’t answer you. Her hands went to her cap but she dropped them before she’d touched it. She looked