You grabbed Jak by the shoulders.
Are you trying to kill him? Will you be satisfied then? If you could let his flesh rot off and pick his bones and join them together again with hinges and make yourself a boy-machine with greased gears and tinkling bells that you can throw off cliffs to your heart’s content and hoist up with ropes and hooks?
All Jak wanted to do was gather his wits but you wouldn’t let him be, you hammered on his chest with your fists there where he was lying against the pillows in the stoep room. He was too tired to do anything to you. But you saw how hard his eyes were, how thin his lips.
From then on, from 1971 on, he tried to take the child out of your hands, out of Agaat’s hands. First he had to go to boarding school in Heidelberg. And then one fine day you woke up to find that everything had been arranged for Jakkie to go to Paul Roos from Standard Seven. Science and maths he had to study, languages and music didn’t pay the rent, and he didn’t want his son to squander his life on a farm one day as he, Jak, had done.
That fire, was it in 1976? Jakkie in Standard Eight? He’d be getting a lift home for the Easter break. The rains stayed away. Warm autumn weather, gusty south-easter, everything crackling with drought, the river just about empty. Perfect conditions for a veld fire.
You were concerned about water for the sheep, about the lambs on the dry stubble-fields. About the sheep-oats that had germinated too late on account of the unusual drought in December. You were preparing to cart dry feed to the mangers. You didn’t want to drive the sheep into the cattle’s grass pasture because that was also rather meagre for the season. The river was too low for much irrigation. You wanted all hands on the farm to help with the lamb birthing. The ewes were weaker than previous years, one of the herds not yet altogether in condition after the acidosis poisoning the previous November. Ate too many loose grains of wheat on the harvested field.
And guess who had driven them in there?
Guess who first saw that they had all lain down?
Guess who then had to doctor them?
It was beginning to seem as if events were unfolding according to a design on Grootmoedersdrift.
In whose plan were you all?
What was being made clear to you?
You were all blind. You were blind. Your mouth was dry from tranquillisers. You stared at these things, and at the faces around you, at your own face in the mirror, but nothing would surrender their secrets. You knew one part of the reasons, the people around you another part. And everybody tried to solve the riddle for himself in his solitude.
That Easter, it was a critical time. You would have preferred Jakkie and Jak to stay on the farm and help look after it. After all, it was in the interests of all of you, you felt. Why did you always have to ask for support, plead for help?
Was it because of the nature of mixed farming that there was always too much to do, and would you really have to change it all if you wanted things to run more smoothly? Was Jak right about that?
How would you have to dismantle such a complex concern and reassemble it differently, with fewer components and fewer troublesome details to attend to? Who would help you to think up and plan such an upheaval?
And what would the farm look like then? Like green wheatfields? A monotonous summer? A monoculture with a general impoverishment?
That afternoon before Jakkie’s arrival. Agaat in the kitchen preparing food. Jak on the stoep with the mountaineering equipment. You in your room with your diary. That’s right, it was the Easter break 1976, you had just started a new booklet.
Writing had in any case increasingly become your way of waiting to see what would happen next. Through writing you wanted to get a grip on your times and days on Grootmoedersdrift, to scrunch up and make palpable the hours, the fleeting grain of things in your hastily scribbled sentences, connecting cause and effect in the stream of events. At least then you could later turn the pages of the diaries, forward and back, and see: This happened before that, and this and that were the first signs of a catastrophe that you wrote up only much later, and this and that were simultaneously requiring attention and not without connection, even though the connection was evident only later.
That afternoon when Jakkie was due to arrive, you were sitting and writing about your farming worries. And about how you were all waiting, each in his or her own way, for this son whom you all wanted to possess and who escaped you all, not in the first place because he was by then already becoming his own person, on the contrary, but because he was afraid, in different ways, afraid and guilty and taunting each of you, because he didn’t know how to please you all at the same time.
You wrote that you could hear Agaat rolling out flaky pastry, thud, thud, with the wooden roller on the kitchen table, for Jakkie’s chicken pie. You went to investigate and her chin was pushed out all the way. She knew that Jak wanted to take Jakkie away to the mountains as soon as he arrived that afternoon. She knew that he wouldn’t be granted a break to eat, she knew that Jak wouldn’t allow any tasty food to be packed for the trip. And yet she was continuing, her lips pressed firmly together, with her preparations.
Were you imagining things, or had you heard her talk on the telephone every now and again the previous week, in the stealthy hours just after lunch while you were lying down?
Was she conniving with Jakkie again?
You didn’t want to ask.
Whatever it was that Agaat had up her sleeve, you knew that her plan would always suit you better than anything that Jak could contrive. You were counting on her by this time. To make things happen in your family, or not happen. Or to stop things from happening. Or to predict things. Rain, wind, floods. She could read your mood like a sky, predict Jak’s movements long before he himself knew what he was going to do.
The twilight was setting in already. You were starting to worry, Jak had gone for a drive in the bakkie earlier to see whether he didn’t meet them on the road. Then the phone rang. It was Jakkie. To say that he’d torn a ligament in rugby and would only be able to get a lift home the following morning and he didn’t think he’d be able to be very active, the doctor said the leg needs rest.
Was it all Jakkie’s scheme? Thought up on his own?
Jak had just recently acquired television on the farm. Perhaps Jakkie wanted to stay at home watching sport rather than go mountaineering, or just wanted to relax at home? Perhaps Agaat wanted to watch television? Perhaps she wanted to get Jak away from there, because he’d forbidden her to watch television, didn’t want her to see too much of the school riots in the north.
You give them the best that you have and just see what you get in return, he said, and glared at you as if it had been you who had stuffed Afrikaans down the gullets of the people.
Jak said nothing when he heard that Jakkie was no longer arriving that evening, and that he couldn’t go mountaineering. He tightened his headlamp around his head, filled his water bottle in the kitchen and shouldered his rucksack.
Agaat went and fetched his ropes on the front stoep and came and put them in his hands.
Oh yes, of course, I almost forgot, what would I do without you, Agaat, Jak said.
His voice was odd. He looked her straight in the eyes. He tugged at the roll of ropes in his hands.
Without any greeting he walked away from the yard in the dusk. You and Agaat watched the little light until it disappeared up into Luipaardskloof.