Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [42]
Was that when Jak conceived his strange theories about you?
Over my dead body, he said, there’s nothing wrong with me. Nor with you. It’s in your head something is wrong. It’s because you wear yourself out like that, he said, just stop bawling, then things will come right, it’s because you complain about everything, because you flap about here on the farm with a long face. Where is the loving gentle Milla that I married? Look at you, pale as pale, as if you’re anaemic.
He thought you were putting it on when you said you were tired. Invited Beatrice and Thys in the evenings on purpose so that you should have to go and get dressed and made up.
Just see how much life there still is in her after a day’s toil, a real never-say-die, my little Kamilla.
And then he winked at you, and rubbed it in even further.
Just a short while ago she was hanging from a branch, furled like a bat, dead-tired, now she’s chattering like a finch. Goes to show what good friends mean to you here in the Overberg.
You saw Beatrice looking from him to you and back again. I’m here if you need me, she’d already whispered to you a few times, but you resisted her. She was more inquisitive than anything else. And greedy. For power, for status. Constantly comparing her husband’s position in the community with Jak’s. And the gossip over who was, was going to be or wanted to be chairman of this or treasurer of that. Mud-slinging. Jealousy. The secession of the Swellendam members of the National Party from the Bredasdorp branch was the latest, and how she’d had tea with the wife of Van Eeden, the new chairman. You in your own terms were not an item. Barren. Dry ewe. You felt that everybody was against you. Jak was starting to sound like your mother when he provoked you. And the gossips were agog for news from Grootmoedersdrift, for reasons, for scandal.
Ma was concerned on the one hand, but also critical of your childless condition. You could hear it in her voice on the telephone, sometimes sneering, you thought. Even so you phoned her every evening. With who else could you talk about it? She recommended traditional remedies. Like standing on your head afterwards, like drinking an infusion of stinging nettle.
Some evenings you couldn’t stop crying after putting down the phone. This infuriated Jak.
That mother of yours, he said, a violent tea cosy if ever there was one, cosy on top and down below she latches her claws into you.
Then you really cried. Jak was right. It wasn’t about what you could or couldn’t do. It was yourself, something in you that offended her. Your character.
I am who I am, how can I help it? you sobbed.
Jak slammed doors and stormed out of the house and drove off when you were like that.
Just don’t leave me alone, you pleaded.
You tried everything to prevent him from going. Played on his feelings, flattered him, nestled up against him.
Get out, out of my guts! he pushed you away, for heaven’s sake go and blow your nose!
But you knew that if he got rough enough with you, you could keep him with you. Then at least he was involved. You learnt to use his anger, the energy of it. It was less than nothing.
A smack in the face, a blow on the back.
Billing and cooing on Grootmoedersdrift.
You couldn’t stop crying about it all. Am I then never allowed to feel weak? you asked, but that only infuriated him further.
It went quickly. Two, three years. You no longer guided his hand over your body to teach him how to touch you. You were after something else. You bent your head and sucked him off and caught his semen in your hand and tried to inseminate yourself.
His preference in any case. I don’t want to see your face when you’re so miserable, he said. Often he didn’t even notice that you were crying.
You prayed every time that you would take, made pictures in your head of cells simultaneously shooting, a comet shower, a cataclysm, a fusion.
Why can the animals manage it so easily? Am I of the wrong nature, then? Comfort me then, just hold me, you pleaded at times.
But if he didn’t put a cushion over