Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [308]
Your mother’s feigned chatter. Did she know what she was doing? Did it dawn on her while she was bringing it up? You fancied that she was talking more slowly, as if she could feel something stirring, an idea, a plan.
You could have started saying something. You could at least have opened your mouth. But you were enthralled by the tale. A bad mother, a discarded child.
That was the story she dangled in front of your nose.
Was that how she sought to avenge herself on you? To ensure that you wouldn’t escape your portion of pain in life?
You remember the day well, when you set off under your mother’s watchful eye by the back door to the labourers’ cottages.
Be careful, it’s a holiday! she called after you.
There were cicadas chirring louder and louder the further you walked, devil’s thorns sticking to your sandals at every step, prickle-grass on your hem, the white-hot sun of the noonday hour, no shadows.
It was quiet around the cottages, the hangover silence of the Day of the Covenant, a stink of excrement hanging over everything. Skinny dogs lying around with flies in their eyes.
Maria was sitting at the back against the house under the fig-tree in a tattered dress, a warp around the mouth that you didn’t know. The two sons were there, Dakkie and Hekkie, your erstwhile playmates, with scars across their cheeks that hadn’t been there when you played with them as a child. They replied to your questions sullenly. Only once did Maria come half erect, only when you were about to leave, only when you asked so where is your new husband, and I hear you’ve had another child. Almost as if she wanted to prevent you from asking it, wanted to prevent its being discussed, she got to her feet and gestured vaguely and then sank back on the bench against the wall, chin on the chest.
The back door was ajar but you walked round the front to go in, you knocked and waited and then turned the knob and pushed open the door, took in your breath and held it when the smother hit you, of rotten piss, of vomit, of old sweet liquor, of unwashed human bodies, of cold cinders and half-burnt bluegum wood. At first you could see nothing, so dark was it in the front room, then through a half-open door in another room, a mattress on the floor and a coil of dirty bedding in which you could make out a man’s lower body.
Only when you pushed open a shutter did you notice the child, crouched in the corner of the blackened hearth with the knuckles of one hand crammed into her mouth.
You went on your knees in front of the hearth. The child was bitterly thin, the little legs full of scratches and bruises, her bony body visible in patches through the rags in which she was dressed. One foot was turned in and one little arm she kept pushed in behind her back. You found the child’s eyes, but only for a moment before she jerked away her head and screwed her eyes shut as if expecting a blow.
Never mind, I won’t do anything to you, you said.
The child started trembling.
I really won’t do anything to you, you tried again and extended a hand but the child pressed her head between her knees, and pulled the hidden arm from behind her back and clamped it around her head.
It was a deformed arm, thin and undeveloped, the hand bent down from the wrist, the fingers half squashed together, the thumb folded in so that it looked like a shell, like the hand that your father taught you to make by candlelight when you wanted to imitate the flat head of a snake.
You got to your feet and leant forward in the hearth-opening towards the child.
What’s your name? you whispered softly, tell the kleinnooi what your name is, won’t you? For a long time there was silence, only the child’s breath coming faster.
What do they call you? Tell me, then you come to me, then I’ll stop them hurting you, the oumies says they do bad things to you.
In the silence you heard the man groan and turn over in his sleep. Must I ask your father, hmmm?
Then you heard it, from the cavern of the child’s body where she’d stowed her head, a guttural sound.
Say again, I