That’s what you thought but you weren’t sure. Your handwriting struck you as strange, more upright, harder than you thought of yourself as writing. You tied the booklets up in piles with kitchen string. Your hands were trembling. You locked them in the sideboard with the other documents.
There you stood in the sitting room, shaky, after you’d locked up the books. The sideboard gleaming, darker than usual. The dining-table, cleared, glossy, with a vase of flowers on top. No sign of the meal earlier or of the discord. But the dining room felt ominous. Every familiar thing was, under its surface, at its core, as if charged with dynamite.
You felt somebody was looking at you, there where you were standing with the key of the sideboard in your hand, but the curtains were drawn, the back door was closed, there was nobody. Here it is now, you thought, the last link that’s chafing through. Everything you lived for, everything that you built up, all the facades that you maintained, the whole lie that you lived. The last link.
The key was sweating in your hand.
At last you slapped it down on the table for all the world to see.
You went and sat on a chair in your room in the dark, a woman over an abyss, the coming of morning a ghastliness, the first thrush a deathly herald. Agaat bringing your coffee and saying nothing about your just sitting there in the previous night’s clothes, just raising her eyebrows over the pills that she’d put out for you and that you’d not taken.
You were scared of her. More scared of her when she was right under your eyes than behind your back. You cringed away from the brisk pace at which she kept doing her work. It was as if she’d been beating you with sticks, with irons, since the previous evening, and still now, the day of the feast. You couldn’t believe it, the calm cheerful face she put on.
Till late that night she kept it up.
Till the flying in the aeroplane.
Only then could you breathe in an odd sort of way.
Then it was her turn to be beaten.
Was it the abominations of your own family that opened your eyes to the power or impotence branded on the faces, the whitewashed disgraces of the guests who started arriving in groups or pairs the following day? Was it the lack of sleep? The pills you hadn’t taken? So that you, for the first time in how many years, were soberly and austerely aware of what was happening around you?
12 August 1985. You are cordially invited.
You suddenly saw everything so clearly through Jakkie’s eyes, pe-eep squeak the wives, bu-urp croak the husbands, the high-pitched little-girl voices in which the women twittered, the coarse bravado of the men, the children insolent or timorous, the childminders, feigning docility, but already casting long glances towards leftovers in the kitchen, bread, fat, candles and cloths and soap and matches. A pillage it would be again, as always.
You saw yourself standing in the garden mirrors, in your red dress. You heard your voice warbling. You shook the hands, pressed your cheek against the powdery cheeks of the women, kissed the slobbery mouths of the men.
My mother is pathetic, they keep each other pathetic, the whole community. Jakkie’s words of the previous day. Your child. Blood of your blood. Not impossible, surely, that his message had taken effect on you immediately. Brainwashing, another voice in you protested, that’s how subversion and brainwashing operate.
Welcome, welcome to Grootmoedersdrift! you said again and again.
Clearly I’m stuck between two cycles of brainwashing, and me without my pills as well.
You looked at Jak and Jakkie, emboldened in their display by a need to make up for the previous evening. Both ashamed of their lack of memory, they tried to tell each other what a load of crap they’d talked. Agaat rubbed it in. The Alka Seltzer and the vitamins, the big can of orange juice and the pot of strong coffee that stood ready by their breakfast plates that morning.
And then there was the moment, after breakfast, when Agaat overplayed her hand, when Jakkie had to promise her solemnly that he wouldn’t drink any more on his birthday, and that he would make a nice speech. That’s as far as you could hear, before Agaat went into her room.
He stood talking over the half-door.
On my own birthday, Gaat?! he exclaimed. He averted his face from the door of the outside room. You were looking out of the kitchen door, saw the expression come over his face, the one you’d so often seen in Jak, the desire to inflict hurt.
You saw Agaat appear in the doorway. You saw her catching Jakkie’s glance.
The next sentence you could only partially make out.
Then you can explain it! was what it sounded like, and: No, I’m not going to write anything, next thing it will find its way into the wrong hands. So you go ahead and write something! Think up something!
Was that what you heard? His face was half inside Agaat’s door. Then he pulled back his head and the sun fell on his brown curls, long, you thought, for an officer who’d only just been granted a pass.
Well, he said, his hands on the half-door, if I’m not even allowed to drink on my own birthday, and if I have to pronounce according to your precepts, you heard him say, then you, my dear Agaat, will get into the plane this evening so that I can show you what Grootmoedersdrift looks like from up there! A full moon has been requisitioned especially for you! Wonderland by Night!
Jak was coming from the direction of the sitting room, walked past you in the kitchen, out into the backyard. He heard what Jakkie was saying. They laughed together at the prospect of loading Agaat into the aeroplane. They were on their way to inspect the fuel supply and the landing strip.
Those were the movements of that morning, the voices, the sentences, the faces in doorways, the backs, the fronts, the standing still, the turning away, the walking past.
You waited as the feast continued into evening, the torches and the fires lit, the silhouettes of skewered animals rotating on spits. Grotesque it looked to you. And smelt too, the air dense with roasted flesh. Witches’ Sabbath. But who were the witches? Surely not these cordial effusive people who’d come from far and wide for your son’s birthday? Perhaps I’m psychotic, you thought, perhaps I’ve been dependent on my medication for so long that I degenerate into an enemy of the people if I skip a day. That’s what Jak always said: Take your pills, Milla, so that you can shut up while the men make war.
You tried in vain to vanquish the thoughts. But you kept looking out for the first stirrings of mischief as the great bowls of salad and the baskets of bread were carried in under Agaat’s command. You tried to keep a clear line of sight as you helped to serve the people, all the old acquaintances, and their children who were gathered there like replicas unto the third and the fourth generation. You couldn’t snap out of it. All the convivial noises sounded so false to you. Even Beatrice and Thys, your oldest friends, aroused your distrust. They were the dominee’s confidants. They would carry report of every guffaw that was too loud and every note that was false and every drop that was drunk in excess. To the nearest hundred rand they’d be able to estimate the cost of the whole thing. They’d be able to calculate the tithe that would be proportionate to the cost and submit it to the representative of God in the Swellendam district and he would in his own time and season come and claim it for the swelling of the church coffers. You could talk to them, to protect Agaat, to speak to Jak. You could try to talk to Dominee himself.
But what would they be able to do about it? About your presentiment that a slow explosion was blowing all of Grootmoedersdrift into hundreds of shards and chunks? You were alone with the sensation. You tried to shake it off, had coffee brought to you to bring you to your senses. Lack of sleep, you thought.