I hear her at the front door. She wipes her feet on the cane mat. Once, twice, checks under the soles, once more. A sigh. Then she’s in. She closes the door, locks, latches from the inside. She looks at the latch. She turns round. She looks at the sitting room. She takes one step in, another, she’s on the carpet. Now she’s ready. Now the hand does what it finds to do, the left hand in front, the right hand behind.
I hear a curtain, another, I hear a note, a phrase. Then she finds the tune. Then I find it. It’s for me, Agaat, I know, sing for me there in the sitting room. Blow the wind southerly, she hums. She knows it from the old record of Kathleen Ferrier. Did we throw it away with the clearing-out? Her voice is weak. She clears her throat, starts again.
Sing, Agaat. You sing the old-old tunes. Sing the songs of yesteryear. The music of the front room. Sing of the wind round the corners of the house, the south-easter, the north-wester. The song of the window frames, of the door frames and the curtains, of the standard lamps and the carpet with the red flowers and the sideboard of dark imbuia that has surrendered its secrets. And the riempie chairs and the riempie bench and the round table in the corner. The mute words of people, the still dense things, the old ornaments from which at the beginning you couldn’t keep your eyes. Are you touching, now, Diana and her tame wolves in old brown porcelain? Do you pick up the little copper Indian shoe, the shoe in which you always in spring put the kukumakranka for me? And the swans of white blown glass, do you touch their necks and do you see the green vase for freesias, the blue one full of daffodils, the big grey vase that you stuck together, the one for the wild flowers of September, for the first blue lupins, for the blue-purple hydrangeas?
Sing softly of the evening’s coming and of the evening meal, the sausage and eggs and the red tomatoes and the fresh loaf with the crackled brown crust, the milk in the jug that was a wedding gift, the square of butter under glass. The white tablecloth, the oven glove around the ears of the black iron saucepan, the sitting-down, the hands under low light, around the knives, around the forks, the spoons with the ivory handles, the people who look at each other, or do not look, speak to each other, or do not speak, or speak without words. Sing, that you may be consoled. Because that you now have to do for yourself, as you’ve always had to do.
Oh sing, sing, Agaat, of the wind that blows from the south and the ship in the offing, because it is in the offing. I see it in the distance. White is its bow and its splines are white and it’s coming over the hump-backed hills, closer I see it coming, ever closer.
I understand. You don’t think my joke this afternoon was funny. It’s a sad song, that’s all.
I open my eyes. The lights are suddenly on in the room.
Look, says Agaat, with all the hubbub you haven’t even seen yet.
She points next to my bed.
The rainbow is gone. Now there is a mountain with a vlei in front of it. It is full of white water-hawthorn. The mountains reflect a darkness amongst the flowers. An early-morning scene, a painting from the sitting room. I thought we had thrown it away.
The blue blue hills of home, says Agaat, I went and fetched it from the cellar.
And look here, the portrait of the grandmother. I thought you might want to see it once more.
It’s the portrait in front of which my mother used to make me stand when I was small. Her hand heavy on my shoulder. Look, Milla, it’s she who farmed into being this little plot of earth. One day it will be yours.
A matriarch in the making, her mouth young, her plump white fingers folded round a rolled-up document, her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, her cheeks two touched-up red stains, the collar around her neck of fine white lace, the one eye small and fierce, the other one larger, clear-sighted, the eye over which something reflects distractingly on the gibbous glass of the oval frame, a rectangle of white, my bed, a smudge of grey, my head, my grey hair on the pillow.
Clear out clear out my iniquitous life! screams the bob-head-doll she strikes her stick on the floor give away! bequeath! burn! the wise hoard no button the prudent begin discarding at fifty a lifetime’s gleaned-together rags tassels and tatters those condemned to death would have to clear out all save the rope of the gallows enviable the chaste suicide’s furious meticulousness museums are in cahoots with the negligence of the dying a comb a necklace a shoe-horn writers hook after the last hung-up coat a hat behind the door rummage in bottom drawers they the custodians should rather have to sing inflammatory songs in the archives should with the last cadences have to dig holes in the cellars raise demolition-axes light purifying fires come beloveds let us expedite the onslaught of moth and rust! and let us inspire the breath of the blowing dust! start with the linen cupboard! start with the veil-netting of the third dress of a woman start with the redundant winding-cloths the cosy coverings with which one tries to charm death give away! bequeath! burn! I make the list and you make three piles for giving away burning and bequeathing and today you will be in paradise with me even before the cocks have crowed.
It was the day of the pork measles, the evening after the accident with the tractor winch, December ’61, after supper. Agaat brought Jakkie in with ‘great news’ on her face, ‘good news’.
She could hear you and Jak were having words again. She could hear it was going to go awry again.
She put the child down on the mat and brought in the coffee after supper and said ‘something’ had happened.
Jak was too annoyed to notice. A deputation of workers had come at knocking-off time that afternoon to tell him that they wanted new pit lavatories at their homes, the old ones were dilapidated. You heard it all, you were in your room, exhausted after the day. You’d often spoken to Jak about sanitation for the workers, he simply didn’t want to do anything about it.
They were in front of his office door on the front stoep and you heard their complaints clearly.
Yes, Agaat doesn’t do the right thing by them and Agaat says it’s because of people’s shit lying around that the pigs get measles and their slaughter-pig for the month was spoiled and they don’t believe her they thought pork just had spots like that and why can’t they get a sheep then to slaughter and the mies had said the privies would come and when are they coming then and Agaat had threatened the baas was going to shoot their dogs and is the baas going to do it and where are they supposed to find food for their dogs when they don’t have any themselves and Agaat had said their wives can’t work for the mies in the kitchen with germs.
You looked out of the open door of the room onto the stoep. There they stood. Lietja’s husband, Kitaartjie, and Saar’s husband, Piet Skilletjies. You saw them from the back, the ragged seats of pants, the bare patches in the hair from stab wounds, the sloping shoulders. You could smell them, the sharp sweat, the old dirt.
Our children have worms, we want pits with corrugated-iron huts over them and wooden seats, they said.
Jak knew nothing of the morning’s doings, nothing of the medicine-dosing and the grumbling at the labourers’ houses. He didn’t understand what the slaughter-pig had to do with measles and latrines. He told them to get away from his office door, he was busy. You withdrew your head quickly from the window.
It was Dawid there in the office. He had come to speak about his cousin who had been caught in the winch-axle earlier that afternoon with the hay-baling.
Julies is lying in front of the fire and he’s talking confused and the doctor said he has concussion, and his foot, his foot isn’t so good.