Perhaps it’s all to the good, said Agaat, her face expressionless.
She went and fetched her best bottle of preserved quinces from the pantry shelf and said she thought she’d make some custard quickly, to be ready when Jakkie arrived the following day.
Nine o’clock that evening Jakkie phoned from Swellendam and said he’d decided after all to come that night and would you and Agaat come to fetch him please, his lift wasn’t going any further. His knee was bandaged and he had a bad limp. He and Agaat greeted each other with poker faces and he said there’d better be chicken pie and quinces and custard and she said but how else.
They didn’t give you an opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
You three were together that evening as if Jak didn’t exist. Jakkie tucked into the chicken pie. He wanted to watch the news on television, because of the so-called situation in the country. He was in the debating society of Paul Roos he said, and he had to take part in a debate on the advantages and disadvantages of Afrikaans as medium of instruction in black schools.
He was now really getting beyond her in his education, Agaat said, but what would he say to a game of Scrabble?
The two of you helped Agaat wash the dishes and then waited for her to have her meal in the kitchen and then you sat playing the word game around the dining room table till after half past one that night.
Why can’t it always be like this? you thought. Such peace, such harmony? But every now and again you intercepted a glance between Jakkie and Agaat and knew the peace would be short-lived.
‘Quick’ Jakkie built. ‘-grass’ you added for ‘quickgrass’. ‘Karooquickgrasses’ Agaat made of this, by using a blank and spending her last ‘s’ to make ‘tricks’ of ‘trick’ that was already in place vertically on the board. All seven letters and on a red block as well and Agaat won. But only after she’d had to show Jakkie the kind of quickgrass in the old Handbook for Farmers because it wasn’t in Chambers. He maintained Agaat was fabricating it, there was no such type of grass. Then there was a whole argument about whether a word was valid if it wasn’t in Chambers and you had to decide the matter. There’s more to a language than is written in a dictionary, you said, and there would have been mighty little happening on Grootmoedersdrift if you’d had to farm only with the words in Chambers.
That was how you decided. Agaat was the winner, out and out.
Agaat always wins, Jakkie said. He winked at his packed rucksack that was standing ready on the sitting room floor. You pretended not to see anything, not to see at bedtime how Agaat double-locked all the doors and windows, not to see her signalling to Jakkie with her little hand to lock the kitchen door from the inside. Pretended not to see Jakkie walking, suddenly without a limp, across the kitchen floor to lock the door with a loud grinding noise.
But Jak’s onslaught did not come at night.
You had just returned the following morning from the first round of taking out feed, busy in the garden putting in plants for winter when suddenly he was standing behind you. Dishevelled. Red in the face, a white ring around his mouth, spit accumulated in the corners of his mouth.
It was twelve o’clock and the sun was shining viciously.
Jak’s mountaineering clothes were torn. It looked as if he’d wrestled in the dust with some wild creature.
You carried on with your work, thought you would keep it light, would pretend not to have noticed that he was in a state.
Home is the hunter, home from the hill, you said. You moved to the flowerbed behind the plume bushes to be out of sight of the workers on the yard or of somebody coming out onto the front stoep.
Jak hauled you upright, grabbed you by the front of your dress.
Nobody would believe me, he hissed in your face, nobody, everybody would think I’m mad if I had to tell them about you, but I know I’m right! About how you really are!
You tried to keep your voice light and removed his hand and bent down next to your flowerbed where, with the little hand-trowel, you were putting in seedlings for the winter garden. Calendula, a few sowing trays of purple pansies.
A voice crying in the wilderness? you said, you must be careful, next thing the baboons will be barking at you!
Yes, said Jak, you’re right, I see it in the wilderness, I see it when I’m hanging from my ropes between heaven and earth, then I understand it, dumb retarded bastard that I am, I see it only after I’ve run myself to a frazzle for miles, or when I’m clambering up sheer rock faces. Then I see it, then I see what’s happening here!
Good heavens, Jak, what about the glories of nature? you asked. When last did you see a march rose, hmm? Or the great emperor butterfly of Grootmoedersdrift? You frequent such privileged vantage points, you should put it all to better use!
Jak kicked the trowel out of your hand and pushed you over off your haunches so that you landed flat on your behind in the flowerbed.
Why would any self-respecting woman put up with it? he shouted. Why? Why?
Why would she allow herself to be shoved around without phoning the dominee? Without telling a single mortal? Why? Why does she stay? Why does she have a child by such a man? Why does nothing of the fuck-up at home ever show to other people? Always only excuses! Her homestead, her farm, her birthright, her child, her reputation in the farming community? All just to be able to stay with this Jak de Wet, the poor bloody bugger who has to hear every day that he won’t do, he’s trash.
His eyes were staring wildly in his head, veins bulging on his forehead. With every question he prodded you with his foot, against your knees, against your ribs.
Jak, you’ll have a heart attack, you said, calm down.
Bitch! As if you cared! Shall I tell you why you stay with me? You need me to mistreat you. Do you know why? That’s how your mother taught you. And her mother before her taught her, all the way to Eve, to the tree in paradise.
Jak tore off his shirt so that the buttons popped. You were shocked at his body, so lean and so hard.
Don’t look at me, Milla, that’s what’s bloody-well left of me and at least I know it. A wife-batterer with self-knowledge. What about you? Do you know what I see, Milla?
A cattle farmer, a connoisseur of sheep, a wheat and soil expert, a gardener. You keep things running smoothly on this godcursed little farm. But what do you look like? Like something out of your mother’s old books. Genoveva of Suurbraak. And why? Because you feel inferior. Because you want to feel inferior.
Look at me, Milla! Look, here is your accomplice. I help you with it. Do you think it’s possible to become like me all on one’s own? And you can’t tell anyone about it, can you? Where on earth would you have to begin? More difficult than a magazine story, I can tell you. There it’s the hero who has the insight and the heroine who swallows it all whole.
I the precious, I the victim. How would you ever get something like that past your lips at your sanctified tea-drinking at a church bazaar? No, oh no, there you also have a substitute, there you prefer to worship your b’loved Jesus nailed to his cross. A pity the pictures always show him with his bloody little feet already neatly nailed together. Otherwise you could dream with your mouth full of bazaar cake that Pilate was poking a stick up his holy hole. Which would make him more worthy of your worship!
Jak, you’ll burn in hell, stop it!
No, Milla. I’ve been there for a long time! You’re the one pretending to be in heaven. Never a word in public, no, your mess is for the nest, for the inner chamber. Selected me by the balls, didn’t you? Raised me to your hand! Bedtime story! Little woman whines for attention until she gets the kind that she most appreciates. Thud, bang, blood in the nostril, from ballroom to slapstick in two winks.
Backbone of the nation, bah! Thanks to you and your kind the Afrikaner deserves an early demise. You’re a pestilential species!