She got Dawid to put the canopy on the bakkie and laid a single mattress in the back. You’d spend the night there if they didn’t turn up, she decided, you in the back and she in front. You’d have to wait there until they arrived. She had a bag of wood dragged up for a fire in case it should be necessary. You started trembling as you were loading the stuff in the half-light of dawn. You realised you were furious, more furious than you’d ever been in your life, at what Jak had done to you. But your fury was without expression, like a thin cord inside you it was. You couldn’t utter it, you would have screamed if you could, you would have cursed, but nothing issued from you. Agaat came and stood by you with one of your green pills in her palm and a glass of water.
Drink that, she said, you’ve got the proper heebie-jeebies.
What if. . you began.
If me no ifs, Agaat said.
She was curt. You knew how she felt. You thought you knew. It would break her heart if anything were to happen to Jakkie.
But there was something else as well. Contempt. For what you’d permitted Jak to do to you. Rebellion because her hands were tied.
It was still twilight when you stopped to wait just beyond the bridge in the first lay-by. The idea was that they would appear there on the other side, on the skyline, and attract your attention and then move on along the horizon all the way to the descent.
As the light grew, Agaat started thinking you might have just missed them. You drove on to a place on the pass where you estimated that they’d have a better chance of seeing you, right opposite a kloof that they would have to cross on the horizon if they’d kept to the plan. The weather was blue with wind and water. A drifting mist covered the top of the lip of the cliff. A white streak of water was rushing down the seam. Lower down it dispersed, a fine spray down in the undergrowth, on either side the claws of a lion, as you as a child had learnt the formation of the foothills from your father, the roundings of the paws yellow with bitou-bush and then the toes, the shiny black rock-nails in the black water.
Now and again a glimmering flushed behind the clouds intensifying the colours of the rock faces. It felt as if you were peering though thick glass. No doubt because of the tranquilliser you’d swallowed, but also from the tension of having to wait there. The landscape was shallow and empty, the smell you got was of cold sheets, of black water and granite.
To and fro you and Agaat passed the binoculars between you. You had to adjust them constantly because your vision was weak in different ways, you near-sighted and Agaat far-sighted.
You couldn’t find anything with the binoculars in the descending mist, tumbling down and down in the black undergrowth of the kloof. Once you saw in the grooves of the rocks your father’s face, the sharp nose, the notch between the eyes, the sad expression around the mouth. Time and again you had to take the binoculars away from your face to try and see where you were. Later you gave up completely, just kept looking purposelessly until Agaat pulled at the cords to claim her turn. Without a word she buffed the lenses dry every time with the long sleeve of her jersey.
You thought of Jak who’d appeared in the door of your bedroom the night before their departure. He was quiet, his footsteps so light that at first you supposed it was Jakkie. He didn’t say a word. Just came and lay next to you and placed his head on your breast. You didn’t move, you heard him swallow, after a while you put your hand on his neck, startled at how sinewy he felt, how bony his back, his vertebrae, his protruding shoulder blades. You hoped that he’d tell you that he knew the route like the back of his hand, that he would protect the child with his life, but he didn’t. He went away, as silently as he had come. Against the backlight you saw his silhouette, his skull with the shorn hair, his neck tensed.
You sat there in the bakkie for hours, you and Agaat. Sometimes an exclamation broke the silence when one or the other of you thought that you saw something, an arm waving, two figures standing next to each other on a misty skyline, a cloth hat amongst the silver bushes, a white collar disappearing into a crack. But it was always just the shifting of the mist, of the sun that from time to time glowed more strongly through the clouds and made colours flare up amongst the black rock faces.
Let’s drive to the place where they’ll come down, Agaat said after a while, perhaps they’re waiting there already.
You drove slowly to give them time to arrive, then again faster to be in time in case they’d already arrived. As you drove further into the pass, in amongst the rugged rock faces, the black river far below, you remembered the trip twelve years earlier. Agaat was inspecting the horizon, the binoculars pressed tightly to her eyes. You could see from her mouth that she was thinking the same thing. You heard her mumble.
I’ll climb up right here, I’ll drag you out of the holes, I’m coming to fetch you down, I’ll fill the pass with my barking from one end to the other, rousing all the baboons all the way to Swellendam so that you can hear with your own ears I’m looking for you.
Was it an hour, another two hours that you waited there in the deepest part of the pass next to the red rock faces? You had to switch on the engine every now and again to activate the windshield wipers. In between short bursts of sunshine the rain sifted down in blue sheets. You constantly looked at your watches, but it wasn’t at the position of the hands that you looked, it wasn’t ten o’clock or then eleven o’clock and then half past eleven, there were other distances, other circuits, revolutions between you and Agaat.
Just tell me that they’ll come, you said to her.
She darted you a swift look. Me, the look said, you want me to reassure you, me, after you caused this trouble, you and your baas!
After a while she did after all mumble, looking straight ahead: They’ll come.
It was Agaat who first spotted them, in the rain, two small dark bundles crawling slowly down the rock faces.
There, there! she shouted.
You both grabbed for the binoculars, her hand was on yours.
Give it to me, she said, give it to me, I’ll look. She pulled the binoculars out of your grip. You let go. You pleaded with your eyes: Let it be true! She returned your look with the usual message: Don’t make such a fuss, either it’s them or it’s not them, I’m not the Lord God on high.
You regarded Agaat as she adjusted the lenses. Her mouth was moving, mimicking what moved up there on the rock face. Or didn’t move. What could she be seeing? Mountain-goats, lumps of sliding turf, sodden bushes worked loose and rolling down? The mountain had been playing you tricks all morning.
It’s them, she managed to say.
You grabbed the binoculars. You couldn’t find them, a swirl of surfaces and ridges and grooves of stone.
Where, where? you screamed. Agaat directed you. Pushed, pulled at the binoculars. A notch at the top. A little way down, to the left. There where the rock is a deeper red above the ledge.
There they were in their green windbreakers. Pressed flat against the rock face, motionless before both of them simultaneously switched a handhold, exchanged one foothold for another cranny. Jakkie was tied to Jak with a rope. But that, you could see, was useless. They weren’t anchored to anything above them. They were carrying their rucksacks. Any disturbance of balance and they would fall down from there, the face was too shallow, handholds and footholds few.
You couldn’t watch. You pressed the binoculars into Agaat’s hand, lowered your head on the steering wheel.
She tried to tell you what was happening. Your ears were humming. You felt as if you were going to faint. What was that suddenly on your back? Agaat’s little hand? What was it that she was tracing for you there? Jak and Jakkie’s movements on the rock face, along the ridge of your spine, next to the knobs and depressions of your vertebrae, Tradouw, the way down. ‘They’ve seen us! They’re waving at us! Show your lights!’