Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [292]
Please, you said, how long must I still be kept in the dark?
You must have sat there for half an hour. There was a bright silence in the yard, birdsong in the September garden, the colours of crowfoot and anemones rioting in the mirror above the half-moon table, a trace of fennel.
Then you heard the crash.
Agaat remained sitting, her hands in her lap, looking straight ahead. Then she got up as if summoned to an everyday task. You remember the image, Agaat at the front door, etched against the bright frame of the spring day as she turned round to face you.
It’s down by the drift, she said, call Dawid, bring the bakkie, hurry.
You looked after her trotting down the road, one hand to the cap.
You went and struck the gong.
They were all there when you arrived on the scene. Dawid and Agaat and a whole lot of children and women from the labourers’ cottages. The Alfa’s back section was sticking up out of the water. One back wheel was still spinning. The top was down.
Jak was hanging over the water a bit further along.
A broken wattle branch had penetrated his chest in front and emerged from his back.
Agaat didn’t look at you.
Take him down there, she ordered Dawid and Julies, but in the end they had to saw off the branch. With branch and all they carried him out onto the bank. His face wore an expression of surprise. His jaw was dislocated. Agaat closed his eyes. Both of you put a foot on his chest on either side and pull with four hands, Agaat said.
One two three, she counted.
The branch came out with a glugging sound.
Sit down, Agaat said, and supported you under the elbow. You couldn’t stay upright.
So there you were lying in the green grass. You and Jak. And Jak’s branch.
The blood seeped away in the muddy water of the drift. The colour of the blood clashed violently with the red of the Alfa.
Agaat sent the women and the children home. Dawid and the other labourers had to go and fetch the tractor and a tow-rope and the stretcher. Saar and Lietja had to phone the doctor and fetch smelling salts from the medicine chest.
When everybody had gone, she bent and pulled the letter out of Jak’s trouser pocket, still as crumpled as when he’d stuffed it in there. It was covered in blood. The writing was smudged.
He wanted to go and hand it in to the police, Agaat said. And then he couldn’t get it past his conscience. And then he charged back, and then he couldn’t make the bend.
She separated the sheets of paper and smoothed them, carefully, and put them away in her apron pocket.
Let’s just revive you, then I’ll read it to you, then I’ll burn it, then we won’t know anything more about it.
Then she bent down and with a quick tug-and-push movement she reset Jak’s jaw.
Useful, you thought, she learnt to do it early with sheep emerging skew-jawed from the dipping-trough.
She came and held the bottle of smelling salts under your nose.
Just see how he skidded, Agaat pointed out.
You looked, the muddy track with the kink, the missing kerbstone from the shallow bridge.
When they put Jak down in the backyard, you heard it for the first time, under the keening from the kitchen, the formulation which they would snigger over unto the third and the fourth generation of labourers on the farm.
The baas of Grootmoedersdrift!
Aheu!
And so he saw his arse!
In the drift of Grootmoedersdrift!
they have not heard from me for so long they may well think I am dead it leaves me cold really I cannot deny I have let the world slip by my hand sometimes I still have the urge to call to scream to get up the need walks in waves but congeals an ocean of glassy gel noiseless salty white coast a dream but I am not sleeping am not dead am awake between me and me all hollows are silted shut a mountain without caves storeys without stairwell trapped in a lift the lift is myself no space to lift an arm sound the alarm the alarm is myself no space between me and me I fill myself fully my filling tissue-tension in a