Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [312]
Morning Kleinnooi, I’ve heard Kleinnooi wants to see my mother and the child, so I came along to hear what the kleinnooi has in her heart, if the kleinnooi doesn’t mind.
The little girl didn’t make a sound, just wriggled with all her might to escape.
Maria yanked the child closer.
This picture didn’t accord at all with your fantasies. In Lys’s gaze there was something you couldn’t fathom. As if she had a suspicion of what was coming. She met your eye insolently. You had to look away.
What would you have thought if you’d been she? So, you in your floral dress, with your armpits smelling of lavender, bite it off, and chew it as we’ve been chewing it for a long time, and then you swallow it gobbet by gobbet with your whitey spit. Take! Guzzle it! It’s our crippledness here that’s been born to us!
Is that what Lys thought? Improbable. Absolutely practical considerations rather, you realised. Her voice was full of calculation when she started speaking, her eyes much more impertinent than her voice.
Kleinnooi, excuse, but is Kleinnooi perhaps feeling out of sorts?
Not out of sorts, out of place, you felt out of your depth, caught out. There were, except in your head, no histrionic thoughts, only a scene that must have played hundreds of times in the past, on farms everywhere in the region.
No what, Lys, I’m fine, let’s just get out of the sun, come in, I have cooldrink for us.
You walked ahead of them into the kitchen to where you’d set out the glasses and the Oros and opened the fridge to take out the cold water. Behind you you felt how Lys, as an initiate in the whiteman’s home, accepted the unusual invitation on behalf of the others and hustled them in at the back door.
So tell me a bit about the child, you started while you poured the cooldrinks into the glasses.
How did she get so deformed?
Lys had her story ready, she delivered it in between smacking gulps of Oros.
No, Kleinnooi, she was just born like that, she started, her arms folded, regarding the child.
Very small and red, with the little hanging arm, at first we thought it was a bit of gut hanging out. Dakkie said sis, Hekkie said take away.
And you, Lys? you wanted to ask, but you swallowed your words.
Ma here was quite odd from looking at it. Didn’t want to give the child tit.
Lys waited behind her glass for a reaction.
We said to Ma, Ma take her, give her tit, she’s going to kick the bucket.
That’s enough, Lys, you wanted to say, but the woman was playing for the benefit of Ma in the gallery.
Pa Joppies said give here, let me go and get rid of that, it’s not my child, my arms are straight as poles, both, my hands are as good as shovels, look, nothing’s the matter with me. Yes, Pa Joppies, I thought to myself, your two feet with which you kicked Ma good and proper in the belly when she was carrying, they’re straight too.
You gathered the empty glasses.
So this child got her kicks in the other place already, Kleinnooi.
Lys scraped her chair across the floor as she turned it round to the sink to get your attention.
And then later when they started kicking her so, they just waited for her to start walking, to get the foot in under nicely, Hekkie and Dakkie both, then I said, if you wanted her dead, you should’ve kicked and have done when she came out, then she didn’t know of anything. Now she’s a person. Now you must have respects. The Lord made her like that. She also has a right.
You waited for the Lord’s appurtenances, the devil, the angels, three crows of the cock.
But they won’t listen and I get the kicks if I try to get in between and our ma she turns her back on it and says nothing, she’s scared of them. Those two, they’ve become like savages under their new pa. Looks to me they want to be like him, kick harder and hit harder and curse harder . . .
Lys worked herself up for the climax.
As if they want to go Satan one better with fire, with blows coming down so that you smell sulphur and hear a screaming like pigs down in the poplars, and more I’d rather not say, the Lord is my witness . . . So it will be a deliverance, it will be