Who is it that clasps the irons of the gate for one last time, that lifts the ring to go out? Who hesitates there by the bars of the cattle grid, who inclines the neck slowly there where the noonday sun falls between the rails? What hoofs are these that cautiously start stepping over the obstacle? Is it a fluttering of any significance?
Are you going to hand me your starched cap to hold for a moment before you take it back again, you who remain behind?
They shut your mouth for you, Jak and Agaat. From that night that you fell into the ditch onto the rotten cow. And by the autumn of the following year they’d started collaborating on planning Jakkie’s birthday feast. A farewell birthday.
You gathered that he’d had his fill of the Defence Force, he was considering a career as a civilian pilot, but first he had to serve out his contract. Agaat knew more, you could see it on her face.
You wrote to Jakkie asking him who all you should invite. Somewhat abruptly he replied: Invite who you want to.
You were affronted. Don’t be so ungrateful, Jakkie, you told him on the telephone, all we’re trying to do is arrange something pleasant for you.
Then he sent a list: Gaf’s Jurie, Lieb’s Hugo, Flip’s Erik.
Jak took out his disappointment on you. He threatened Jakkie with his inheritance to make him stay on in the Air Force. That you picked up a few times when he was talking to him on the telephone.
In the evenings after supper Jak recalled Agaat from the kitchen. She had to present her planning for the feast to him. Ostentatiously spiteful pleasure Agaat derived from this. She ignored you. And Jak ignored you. Mockingly they imitated your style of entertaining to the last detail.
The flower garden must look its best, Jak said, as if he’d ever felt anything for the garden.
With red felt-tipped markers they ticked off on their lists every task completed, a mimicry of your method of doing.
You lost your appetite during this time, mostly stayed in your room, listened to Agaat regulating the movements on the yard and in the house. Your house was filled with a clattering and a shifting and a bumping, creaking floorboards, the chirring of newspaper on the window panes, incessant footsteps, sweeping and scrubbing, the clipping of sheep-shears in the garden. You plugged your ears with cotton wool and Vaseline.
In the evening you took your place at the table when Agaat rang the bell. She avoided your eyes, carried her perfect meals to the table, filled your plates and remained standing mutely behind your chairs. You scrabbled around in the food with your fork. Little Miss Muffet is stuffed, Jak would say, stuffed with her pills and her tears. As a reprimand he would hold out his plate with a large gesture for a second helping.
Agaat was imperturbable, you can still see her, how she places herself before the table to dish up for him, her hands in the air, her face in the shadow of the lampshade. You were hypnotised by the wrists in the starched white cuffs, the strong hand carving with the knife, the weak hand, deep in its sleeve, supporting the meat platter, nudging closer the gravy boat. You couldn’t look away from Agaat’s hands, the doing-hand and the helping-hand, the white and the black and the brown of Agaat’s arms and hands under the bright light on the spotless damask. She never put a finger wrong.
Jak drank a lot at supper. A renewed kind of garrulousness was generated by this. No longer furious, no longer passionate, but bitter, and cynical, and despairing.
The baas of Grootmoedersdrift, he would say, with his glass in the air, drinks to Agaat.
Later you came to know his refrain.
All hail the skivvy! The baas prefers the tyranny at one remove!
Keep my glass filled, Agaat, he said, but keep your madam sober, it’s her fate not to be allowed to carouse with her subjects.
And for Agaat our most total of teetotallers, Jak often said, her I shall keep topping up with words until one day she erupts in eloquence, pissed with wisdom. That’s what always happens to those who know and don’t say!
Agaat smirked when he talked like that.
What was to happen to you all? Something inexorable was hanging over you. The law and the prophets was the phrase haunting your mind all the time. But by that stage you’d long since given up reading the Bible.
Even for that Agaat made up. Her latest was that in the evenings she commandeered all the labourers, no, everybody in the huts, big and small, to the backyard for scripture and prayers. A kind of revivalist sermon she delivered there to them every evening, on the pattern of the broadcast services on the radio, filled with invocations of the fatherland and exorcisms of the enemy. A plot it was, you knew, she wasn’t really a believer, she just knew how it worked. She wanted their co-operation for the preparation for the feast. After the sermon there was of course vetkoek, soup, cinnamon porridge. She nagged at Jak to pour the tots with a heavier hand at knocking-off time so that they should be warmly receptive to the gospel by the time they gathered in the backyard.
During the day she drove them, along with the extra labourers, men and women that Jak had allocated to her and paid to beautify the garden for the feast.
Single-handedly he transported everything she needed by lorry: soil, bark and straw for the rose gardens, fertiliser and new trees and shrubs. He went to Cape Town and bought dozens of garden torches and lanterns. He ordered a marquee tent with smart wrought-iron tables and chairs from a hiring-supply company and had wood chopped and dry-piled and had new spits welded and new braai areas built.
For the guests who’d be staying over, he hired luxury sleeping-tents with mosquito netting and bathrooms, even built a sauna down by the dam.
Jak helped Agaat like a diligent labourer. He cast himself as her foreman. His irony was bitter and full of loathing, his obedience a grotesque display directed at you. You saw the labourers laugh when Jak trotted off to execute Agaat’s instructions.
She accompanied Jak to the lands to select and brand the slaughter-animals and he went and assembled extra slaughter-staff and kitchen help for the feast according to her specifications. They had the outbuildings painted and the yard tidied up.
Jak had a landing strip graded. He would rent a two-seater plane so that Jakkie could treat his friends to pleasure flips during the festivities.
He made a feint of reporting the progress with the preparations to you in the evenings, while Agaat stood by taciturn. The drunker he got, the more he wanted Agaat to play along.
Didn’t he realise that Agaat was playing her own game with you?
She said not a word.
If then at length he lost his temper, he inveighed against both of you.
Ag, how stupid of me to think that the slave-girl could ever really take the master’s part! After all, the slave-girl is in thrall to the mistress. They’re you might say each other’s extension cord. Closed circuit.
Did Jak himself understand that much about everything? At times you got that impression, as on the evening when he filled three glasses with wine and took sips from all three, kept decanting wine from one to the other.
Come Milla, he said, don’t you think it’s time for a little poem? What’s that one that you were always so fond of quoting to me? Love is the empty glass. And then? Bitter? Dark? That holds the hollow heart? Is that how it goes?
But then, you’re Siamese twins, aren’t you, you two, can’t the two of you recite it for me? Isn’t that how your joint unholy history started? With your nonsense-rhymes, not so? There was a woolly, wonderfully, with a paw, like a claw.