But how would I know?
My child the great absence.
What he inherited from me and Jak is definitely recognisable. Slightly melancholy, sometimes quite sharp with his tongue. Agaat one hears most clearly in him. The sayings, the songs, the rhymes, in which he has an obsessive interest. Sometimes she sings something on the phone for him if he can’t remember the words any more.
The bottom of the bottle.
The Sunday morning.
Ai, the ordinary little old songs, and then he did have such a beautiful voice, the child. Would it be him that she wants to ring? A last chance to come?
When he wrote to say he was starting to study all over again, I wrote back saying but surely there’s a department of Afrikaans cultural history at Stellenbosch, isn’t there? And then in his next letter he delivered himself of a whole lot of stuff about how he wasn’t a Patriomanic Oxwagonologist, but an anthropologist, and that meant that it was the rubbish bins of the worthy professorial Brethren of Stellenbosch, not their ideas, that he had to scrutinise under a magnifying glass. The ideas, he wrote, spoke for themselves, they flared to high heaven like pillars of fire in the desert, they couldn’t be missed by a deaf-and-dumb dog with a blocked nose.
It upset me, that the child could now turn so sharply against his own people. Being radical surely didn’t oblige you to become disrespectful. It wouldn’t have been wise of me to react at that stage. Those were his refractory years. Not that he ever fitted in altogether. Even as a child always half-apart, never really interested in his peers, tied to Agaat’s apron strings here on the farm. Later, too, not much time or taste for the antics of his fellow-students or for the other officers in the Defence Force. Herd animals, he said, always had to have a bell-wether and a scapegoat, without those they couldn’t function.
Nowadays he sounds more concerned. Not about the headline news, he writes, but about ‘the little grey bushes’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Surely one can’t live with so little faith in the world?
He writes but rarely. When he writes to Agaat, she no longer shows it to me. Not that she ever really showed his letters, she just read out from them, quoted what she wanted to.
There was just the one letter, the one that she had to show us, Jak and me, the first one after he vanished. Of that I saw only the first line. And when I saw it again, it was so besmeared with blood that the pages were stuck together.
She would supposedly still read it to me. Nothing came of that. More than a year later only did Jakkie report on everything. Rather synoptically. No reference to that first confession and plea.
Did we bring him up wrongly?
Can’t have been too wrongly, for he has a job and a house and a will of his own.
It’s Agaat who’s been most badly hurt. She pines for him, I can see it, when she gazes out of the door in a certain way and closes her eyes for a moment, or, sometimes at night, when the doors here are thrown open and she lowers her embroidery and turns her head askance to listen, her cap tilted at an angle like a radar dish.
Does she want to phone him this morning? Perhaps she’s struggling with the dialling codes for overseas. Perhaps she wants to pretend to be phoning him, for my sake. Perhaps she’s trying to think what she’d better say then, how she should say it, for the benefit of my listening ears.
But I know what her face looks like when she thinks she’s going to be talking to Jakkie.
Perhaps it’s the undertaker, rather, that she wants to phone. For a preview. Perhaps she hopes that it will encourage me, such a quantity surveyor’s assessment. Just as well that I’ve been deprived of speech.
Of the friends it’s only Beatrice that Agaat still allows to see me, if she should want to, that is. After that conversation in Jak’s office she’s rather withdrawn herself from me. Scared of her own emotions. Only now do I realise how widespread it must be. Blunted men, suck-weary women. Only death can still whet their appetites.
Agaat keeps their visits brief since she’s realised it. Gives them tea in the sitting room, lets them greet in the doorway, not a step closer, takes them out again. Closes the front door on their backs. Sometimes they slip through, down the passage. The inquisitive mainly, the spiteful attracted to the bed of affliction.
Such vanity, it all seems from here. The endless stream of visitors that I had here at one stage. Until Agaat decided that was enough now. Now it’s her turn and her turn alone.
Now that I have only my thoughts that I may think, without ever having to express them, the last scrapings of my senses. Light, dark, heat, voices, open doors, wind. The ruin that Agaat helps me to inhabit. A squatter in my own body. Wind-blown settlement. A perilous freedom.
So she would be able to spend the rest of her earthly days writing down what she went through with me. If I provisionally have the advantage, that’s only because I won’t live for long enough to read her writings one day.
She’d be capable of putting my head in a clamp to force me. Specially intended for my eyes. Niche market.
There she is dialling the number in the passage now, she sits down for the conversation. She’ll dissemble more if she thinks I’m sleeping.
This is Agaat, she says. Her voice comes out low.
She clears her throat. Lower the girl.
This is Grootmoedersdrift, Nooi Beatrice, Agaat speaking.
That’s better. In her place. Sharp and clear. The soul of innocence. The brownest servant in the land.
Morning, Nooi, how are you, Nooi?
No, so-so, Nooi. Nooi, I want to ask if you can help me, Nooi. I must get to town tomorrow, Nooi, with Dawid. I want to ask if you could come and watch over Ounooi here for a few hours, please Nooi.
Watch over. Masterly choice of words, Agaat.
What was that, Nooi? No, I must buy all sorts of things, at the chemist and from the shop. And I must arrange things with the printer, for the cards and the programme as the ounooi wants them all for the funeral.
Yes, there’ll be many people, Nooi. If everybody comes it will be close to a hundred people, we’ll have to stir our stumps, Nooi.
Stir our stumps. Lord. Is she making it up, perhaps? Perhaps she wants the farm exchange to hear. Perhaps she’s talking straight into the monotone of the dialling tone.
No, Saar and Lietja wouldn’t know, Nooi, they’re farm people, they’re unwashed.
You’re right in there, my old body-servant, all the way to my neighbour’s wife’s tonsils you’re in.
Yes, everything in order here, Nooi, just last night we almost had a mishap. No, the slimes, the slimes, you know, go and settle under in the lungs, as you know she can’t cough for herself any more.
No, I knock it to the top as doctor taught me, then I remove it with a little suction pump, I know how to by now. Doctor was here, yes, he gave oxygen. We have oxygen here now.
Yes, he showed me how.
Not much, about two hours at a time, but then I get up, then I look.
How do you mean now, Nooi?
No, Nooi, the ounooi plays along very well, she knows I must do it all, she understands.
Yes, Agaat, she lies here and she understands. And she listens to the price you have to pay there on the telephone for a simple neighbourly favour. Old vulture’s beak smacks as she devours the line. Feed her, Agaat. Feed her till she’s gorged.
Agaat lowers her voice. She coughs.
No, quite clear. Completely conscious still.
No, doctor says you can’t do more at home than I’m doing. He says otherwise she must go off to hospital.
That really wouldn’t work, Nooi.
No, I just know, she doesn’t want to. She signed the papers.
She doesn’t want the machines on her. She thinks doctor wants to prescribe to her how. How she must, you know Nooi, how she must. . go before. .