A line of hired waiters with big trays full of dishes of dessert brushed past you on the garden path. The smell of baked chocolate pudding and date pudding and brandy tarts and liqueur sponges in your nose, Agaat’s puddings for Jakkie’s birthday, Jakkie who was yawing to and fro over the yard in the plane so that it sounded as if all hell had broken loose.
Twice you heard something spoken next to you before you could quite catch what was being said.
Agaat can’t come and dish now, Mies, she’s gotten behind with her work in the kitchen. It was Saar. The hesitation in her voice made you press on.
Is she fit to work?
She’s sitting there in her room in the dark, she says her head is sore.
It helped, that you had something to do. You wanted to put an end to the evening. Your actions felt sluggish, your voice muted. It was getting too late for your liking. You sent somebody to chase people off the raft, issued orders that the garden lanterns should be blown out so long and the torches extinguished. You blew out the lanterns in the marquee yourself and started emptying the ashtrays and picking up the butts from the floor. You found yourself standing behind a pudding table, faced with a horde of children of whom the bigger ones had been drinking furtively. Rudely they pointed at what they wanted you to dish up, prodded their fingers into the bowls, a feral look in their eyes.
Hey you! Back! Lietja snarled at one whose sleeve was trailing in the bowl and pushed him away with the back of a spoon against the chest. The plates of the others she heaped up with a grin, everything mixed up.
It was never like that when Agaat stood behind the tables. She preserved the order of the distribution point, gauged the local level of manners. She would have said: Adults first! and like the crack of a whip that would have made the children stand back. She would have made everybody first look at the offering, she would have told them what everything was, all the wonderful names, and then she would have dished bit-by-bit and said come back for more, there’s plenty more.
Over the chaos of the pudding table you looked into the tent.
Around the drinks table across the way the men were huddling together. It was the younger ones who, wet with perspiration from the dancing, were coming to quench their thirst. Raucously they shouted their orders at the waiters. Heads flung back they drank from beer bottles, belched, and then again heads together talked and laughed.
Early evening already you’d seen the hay barn’s door ajar and once or twice had seen a couple go in and out. Now it was evident from the men’s attitudes that they were bragging to one another about their conquests. Two of the childminders sat at one table removing straw from their hair. The women and some of the older and more restrained couples gazed at them expressionlessly.
Every now and again the aeroplane flew low over the roof of the tent, fluttering the candle flames on the tables. Everybody looked up as if they expected to see the wings gash through the tarpaulin.
You crossed the yard to the barn. A clashing of metal was audible, against the grain of the music. It was the ploughshare under the wild fig in front of the door of the barn. It was Corrie Meyers on only one high-heeled shoe. She was hammering on the ploughshare with the crowbar that Jak had hung there to summon the labourers for falling-in time. The crowbar was too heavy for her. Every time she lifted it, her wrists with the silver bangles buckled. Every time she delivered a blow she lost her balance, so that she had to clutch at the swinging share to steady herself.
Corrie’s lipstick was smudged and her mascara was running down her cheeks.
I cannot look at it, I cannot look at it for one minute longer. Hound! Fucking low hound!
Surabaya Johnny. You pretended not to see her.
The barn was murky. Somebody had unscrewed most of the yellow bulbs that Jak had had fitted round the walls. The place smelt of sweat and liquor and stale perfume. On the bales of hay couples were sitting and smooching. Most of those standing on the sidelines were young girls on the prowl and married women making use of the evening to feel some other body under their hands. The dancers were moving in a track along the sides of the barn. The music was too fast, there was something frenetic about the movements of those who could keep up, while the less fleet of foot fell about, bumping into one another and stepping on one another’s toes.
You heard swearing, fuck out of our way here, look where you’re damn-well stepping, man.
At the back of the barn the band blared on. In the dim light the musicians plucked and slapped their guitars. The drummer bullied the other instruments.
You noticed Riekert Meyers amongst the dancers. He was giving his own performance in the middle of the floor with a young blonde woman whom you didn’t know. Riekert spun the girl from his fingertips, first this side round then the other and he pulled her close into him and danced up behind her, with his hands low over her stomach and his hips against her buttocks. You could see on the woman’s face what was happening. The sly sulk, the spite, the satiated vanity that the Meyers brothers induced in all their concubines. He had a sweet little smile on his heart-shaped face. The band was playing for him. A hot little number, as it was known.
You were the first to hear what Corrie Meyers was screaming. She barged smilingly into the dancers and screamed into their faces.
As if it were their foreheads that were on fire.
As if the flames were in her own mouth.
You were outside in an instant. The hay barn was a mass of flame. Smoke and flames were pouring out of ventilation holes and the open door. Through the chink you could catch a glimpse of the inferno inside. It was August and the new lucerne hay was gassy, there were wheat-straw bales with which the stables were kept dry. Behind you the dancers were starting to cluster together with the sluggish reactions of people who have drunk too much. The people came out of the tent and pointed. Nobody did a thing.
The plane was circling about the yard. Will that be enough to satisfy Jakkie now? you thought.
Was that when Agaat appeared? In her black-and-white there in the clearing before the blazing barn? The one to whom all looked, the one who turned round, lifted her good hand for silence, and started issuing orders left and right: You and you and you do this that and the other!
The woodshed and the onion store and the petrol tanks and diesel storage first! she called. Wet the ground all around!
The ordinary garden hoses wouldn’t reach far enough, you knew.
She was the one who remembered the water cart in which water was transported for the cattle in summer, which ever since the last fire you’d always kept filled with water.
Get out the tractor, hitch the water cart, wet the ground first around the fuel tanks, she commanded. She had a bale of wheat-sacks dragged out of the barn.
Untie them! Wet them! Bring them! Jump! she bellowed.
Where’s Jak? you called. Somebody shouted that he was still over at the landing strip.
Agaat sent for the long ladders under the lean-to. She had the young men clamber up, she had the wet sacks draped over the tanks. The men responded to her commands as if she were a general.
Dawid was blundering about and looking wildly around him. Him she sent to the pump-house at the dam to switch on the pump. The pump served the garden irrigation, if it was switched on, at least the house would be safe.
But she thought up something else. She knew where the irrigation pipes ran in shallow trenches in the garden, and she knew where the pipes ran above-ground. She gathered a team of the hired waiters and the kitchen maids and showed them where they had to dig up the pipes. In line they dragged up onto the yard length upon length of black irrigation pipe with spray-heads and laid them around the outbuildings. Here and there a connection had to be made.