Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [321]
It’s not a country for me to live in. To study, yes. The Fat-Anna Schotisse. The Stormberg Vastrap. Nobody has yet written up how exactly this music functioned in the identity-formation of the Afrikaner. Only ever Heimwee by S. le Roux Marais. Couldn’t with the best will in the world call that a fado.
Yesterday’s newspaper I left at the airport. Remarkable journalism. Rugby players on the front page and the back page and the centre pages, lawlessness and corruption, child rape, political denial of AIDS, middle-class sex scandals, letters from indignant creationists.
How in God’s name is it to carry on from here?
In the first place: For the execution of useful research the impulse to go and work for the Red Cross must be suppressed. That’s what I tell myself.
I just want to cauterise it all neatly now. A dry white scar, une cicatrice. Perhaps still slightly sensitive during changes of season in the northern hemisphere. Mourning is a life-long occupation, says my therapist. That is what I must do then. Must learn to do. Mourn my mother, my mothers, the white one and the brown one. Mourn my country. Pa who understood better than Ma how things worked between them, but who couldn’t help himself.
They had to lug the branch out of him, I’ve since heard, with the letter that Gaat wrote on my behalf, covered in blood in his pants pocket. Fancy the detail. Just after it happened, she wrote to me that he’d had an accident with his car in the drift, full stop.
So it was ‘my’ letter, then, that caused it. My poor father.
My poor mother.
What remains? Grieving. Grieving till I’ve mastered the hat-trick. The difficult triple sanity: Wafer, stone, and flower in turn. de Wet individuated.
Do I hear something under the engine noise, through the air conditioning? A melody? A rhythm?
Why that? Of all things? Gaat’s story, the last story that she always had to tell me before I’d go to sleep, the one she never wanted Ma to hear. Her voice close to me, her forehead bent over me, the embroidery on her cap very close, white sheep, white flowers, white, mountains and trees . . .
Images behind my eyelids. High up in my nose a prickling, sooty, smoky, the ember-fire in Gaat’s room. Every word. If she left out one, I knew. If she told anything differently, I protested. Or I said, start all over, you’re not telling it right. Emphases, rhythms, repetitions, questions. Agaat’s strong arm around my shoulders, her small hand on my chest. Her voice, incantatory.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a woman who was terribly unhappy. She lived with her husband on a farm at the foot of a big blue mountain next to a river. Her house stood close to a drift amongst high trees in a garden filled with flowers. It had two white gables and a stoep and many rooms inside. At night when the noises of day died down, and she heard the river flowing, the wind in the trees, the sound of the sleeping mountain, g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g, like the soughing of a shell against your ear, then she was very sad and then she cried in her bed, softly so that her husband shouldn’t wake up. He was a good-looking man with shiny black hair, but his heart was cold. In a loud voice he bragged about nothing at all, his hand was cruel and his head was filled with flippancies. He couldn’t comfort her.
The man was one reason for her unhappiness. But there was another greater reason. Can you guess what it was?
Was she as ugly as sin?
No, she was pretty enough.
Was she poor?
No, she was rich.
Was she without friends?
No, she knew lots of people.
Had her mother cast her off?
No, her mother was fond enough of her, even though she was strict and a bit stingy.
Then I don’t know. Why then was she so unhappy?
She