There were the sallow Dieners of Vreugdevol with their smooth blue-black hair, pure Malay, you realised for the first time. Pass for white, whatever that might mean here on the other side of Sir Lowry’s Pass. The heads were bowed low over the plates, the gills shone as they peered at each other around the white wrought-iron table, as if they were engaged in an eating contest. You went across to them to try to rid yourself of the odd perspective, but they were so engrossed in stuffing themselves, they hardly greeted you.
So then for want of something more constructive to do you took a jug of ice to the Froneman table. For there wife and children with woe-begone eyes were sucking away at lukewarm glasses of cooldrink under the stern gaze of their teetotal father.
Ice, you said, try a bit of ice, it makes everything taste better.
Like somebody from the Salvation Army you sounded to your own ears. They smirked at you half-heartedly.
To one side at their own table were the Killjoys of Loch Maguire. This evening, you thought, their melancholy was extra evident. Pol Knoblauch, the bluebeard with the stiff neck, people said he fiddled with the farm labourers’ little boys, and his wife the soprano of the church gallery. Every week at the gynaecologist’s for indeterminate complaints, it was said.
And the rich Meyers family of Konstandhof, the seven brothers, all with the fine features and the little high-pitched voices, all of them with the glad eye and the one undescended ball as the rumour ran. And their Meyers sisters and female cousins with the mad streak, the whole lot of them, either worked up or down with pills.
Do I also look like that? you wondered. In the faint light of the marquee your red dress appeared black when you looked down. The sleeves felt too heavy on your arms. It felt as if you were moving ever more slowly.
Suddenly Gawie Tredoux was next to you. Just standing there, without a word. His voice when he spoke was tired.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Milla? At the best of times our people are fodder for low-brow soap operas, at the worst for old men with grand plans. And all the young ones want to do nowadays is surf and smoke dagga and play guitar.
You looked at him. He’d aged. Got dumped by his wife. His son a member of some rock group or other that toured all over the country with protest songs.
Look after yourself well, Milla, he said, you know I’m always there if you need me. He squeezed your shoulder.
Thank you for your trouble, tell Agaat as well, everything tip-top as usual, but I’ll be on my way now, not in the mood for a party this evening, you neither, it seems to me, but that’s life, old girl, just grin and bear it, tomorrow’s another day.
So as not to subside into tears, you betook yourself to the hand-picked wives of the Meyers brothers, a harem of shared resentment under the command of their mother-in-law, the painted-up old matriarch of whom it was rumoured that she’d been a photo model in her youth. In spite of her advanced age it was very clear in the candlelight where her sons’ high cheekbones had sprung from. Half maliciously, half gloatingly, her daughters-in-law sat by her and complimented you on the feast, on your son, on your husband. They were sisters under duress. Heir mares. Assessed on the hind-quarters and bought in for the purpose. Fertiliser Princesses. Co-op Queens. Style, Overberg Barbie, as Jak would say. You could easily spot the sons, the precocious lordliness with which they were appraising the girls.
And there was Jakkie amid it all, amiability itself. He’d kept to his word, it seemed to you. He greeted, served, endured. He replied to Jak’s speech, albeit not with great warmth, correctly and with the proper number of tame jokes. He expressed his thanks. My dear mother, my mainstay of a father. The only sign of a more alert, more intelligent creature under all the formalities were the special words full of double meanings to Agaat whom he had called to the front next to him during his speech.
He thanked her for the food and the garden and the planning of the whole feast. She is someone who reaches great heights, she is someone who spreads her wings wide, she showed him as a child how the blue crane becomes airborne, white-throat crows go from here to great Tradouw, she showed him what a tailwind does to the flight of a weaver, and a headwind to a gull, she named the clouds for him and taught him to read the currents in the air and told how the devil constructed whirl-winds from the dust of the hills.
And: It will be an honour and a privilege for him to take her as his first passenger on a special birthday flight.
There was loud applause. ‘Smear that mouth with jam!’ one shouted. ‘Real smooth talker De Wet!’
Jakkie handed the parcel, wrapped in your gift wrap, to Agaat. It was also her birthday recently, he said, and it’s something she’ll need for her first flight.
‘Open it! Open it!’ people shouted.
Agaat struggled with the paper, embarrassed with the little hand that didn’t want to grip properly in front of an audience. Jakkie took it out of her hand and stripped off the sticky-tape and gave it back to her.
Take it out, he gestured with his head.
It was a shimmering, shiny raw silk headscarf, plain red. It slithered and shone in the lamplight as Agaat shook out the folds.
You saw Agaat’s eyes flashing. How could she say: Blow in my face so that I can smell whether you’ve been drinking? Could she tell from his words that he was too eloquent? How far is it permitted for a servant to investigate the breath of her kleinbaas?
You thought of the scene of Jakkie five years old blowing into Agaat’s face where she was standing before him on her knees.
Stole chocolates!
Chewed fennel seeds!
Ate apricot jam on your bread! she could guess with shut eyes.
Why hadn’t you tried to talk Jakkie out of the idea of flying?
You took him by the shoulder. Hard he is, you thought, far removed from me. Even without the stiff blue serge of his captain’s uniform his body felt unyielding.
You want to make a spectacle of her. That’s all you said.
He removed your hand from his body and put it aside as if it were a marmot. You were close enough, you could smell the liquor on his breath. He had a contrary look in his eyes.
Ma, he said, what happens now, is between me and Agaat. My bit I’ve done. .
He looked away before he carried on talking.
She’ll get into that Cessna with me and feel how it feels to be as free as a bird. Because that’s what she’s scared of. That’s what you’re all scared of. You’re more scared of freedom than you are of the communists. Even if it fell into your laps you wouldn’t recognise it or know what to do with it.
So I’m not permitted to say what I want to say. Agaat’s orders, she actually thinks she can prevent the whole assembled Overberg’s evening being spoilt for them here. Then she has to pay for it. I’m not the one who’s making a spectacle of her, she’s making a spectacle of herself. It was on her behalf amongst others that I wanted to speak. So if I may not do it, and she can not do it, better then that we go up into the air together.
Jakkie glared at you.
Perhaps she’ll be able to tell me at last up there in the clouds where she came from and how she ended up here on Grootmoedersdrift, in her stupid cap and school shoes, there in the back in the outside room, so faithful, so prematurely aged and so set in her ways, with her embroidery and her writing pads, a tyrant over others here on the farm.
They hate her, they mock her. It’s you who made her like that, Ma, you and Pa. She’s more screwed up than Frankenstein’s monster.
You sound like your father, you wanted to say, it’s a different story, but it’s the same arrogance.
But you didn’t. You were ashamed that he could say one thing and do the opposite and not notice it.