Wretched Jak, Hollywood to the last gasp, or perhaps not Hollywood, at most a Leon Schuster farce.
Two days after his death I said to Agaat: Clear out, pack all the papers in boxes so that the executors can come and collect them, carry everything else out into the back here, everything so that we can sort it. I didn’t want to see anything more of him. The car I had towed away immediately without further ado, I didn’t want to have to stare at it every time I drove out.
Ai, the baas, the baas, Agaat said with a straight face when she came in with the piles of photos and asked what she should do with them all.
Throw away, I said, take them all to be burnt, everything, out, away, I have no use for them. Just roll up the maps nicely for me.
About the racquets and the training-bench and the weights and the abdomen-strengthener and the mountaineering ropes and the crash-helmets and the knee-guards and the calf-vibrator and the lumbar-massage wheels and the electrical foot-palpitator I wondered, a sale I thought, an auction, but I didn’t feel up to the faces of the people. I had it all carried to the scrap-iron heap behind the implements shed. From there, I knew, it would in time be drawn, with the rusted ploughshares and old pieces of corrugated iron, into the recycling vortices of the farm.
That was in 1985. For years after that I would see the children on the farm walking around with the medals around their necks or playing in the dust with the silver trophies. That’s all they retained of Jak, his toys. And the adults who experienced it, to this day I sometimes hear them talk amongst themselves about the spectacle. The master of Grootmoedersdrift, shrike-spiked like a beetle.
Jak’s law books and action novels, his piles of magazines and photo-books full of sports heroes, catalogues of sports cars and expedition diaries of mountaineers and sunglassed adventurers in the Alps and the Sahara and the Amazon and the South Pole I donated to the town library. I immediately regretted doing it. The little librarians gazed wide-eyed at the material, as if they wanted to ask how I’d handled all that virile energy. As if they wondered how a mouse-face like me could have kept up with all the grandiose flights of fancy of my Camel Man.
But that one could never try to explain to the Swellendam town librarian. And also not to the chairlady of the Women’s Agricultural Union. Her I didn’t even warn that a mirror was imminent, a wall-sized mirror that had covered one whole side of Jak’s office. I had its panels unscrewed and packed and delivered to Dot Stander’s house with the message that it might be just the thing for fitting out the hall where the annual flower show was held. Forget-me-not, I thought, I’d often gone myself to clean the mirror there, the sweat-spatterings and the other splotches, I didn’t want the servants to see them.
Only the maps I kept, the old map of conveyance, the one that I’d found amongst my heirlooms after Ma’s death, with the little painted pictures of all the special places on the farm. That map was the most original of the collection. Then there was the old transfer-duty map with the boundaries and beacons. And the water map on which the rivers and the underground veins of water, the boreholes and watering places and the fountains were shown, and later the surveyor’s map when the irrigation scheme from the Theewaterskloof and the Duivenhoks was laid on. And the topographical map with the fall of all the slopes marked on it, the contour lines, the heights above sea level written on every numbered hill and mountain slope. Jak later had the rest requisitioned and ordered from the divisional council, district maps with all the other farms in the vicinity. On these you could see that Grootmoedersdrift was the biggest farm in the area and had the best soil and commanded the best grootbos, fynbos and the best water catchment area. The big soil composition map I’d had compiled by Agricultural Technical Services with, incorporated on it, the photos of the vertical sections showing all the soil types of Grootmoedersdrift, the red sand and the yellow sand on brittle stone, the clay loam and the sandy loam and the riverine turf. Then there was also the whole of South Africa, and a world map, Jakkie’s school maps on which he and his father drew with compasses and calculations the exact proportions and location of Grootmoedersdrift darted with dovetailed arrows.
Roll them all up together, tie them with string, I said to Agaat, and put them in the sideboard with the photo albums. They belong with our records.
It can’t be long now before she remembers it.
The garden hangs suspended, shimmering, in the mirror, a blue cradle, a nest dandled in the afternoon light. I hear a rustling. In the mirror I see a veil of mist irrigation slowly precipitating over the flowerbeds. The leaves scintillate, the stems start bending as the flower-heads grow heavier, my garden in all its glory.
The back door opens. Quarter past five. Agaat has been to collect the eggs before the skunks can carry them off. I can hear from her footsteps that she’s carrying a precious cargo, the round-bellied basket with straw in the bottom. I can imagine how it was. Grope-grope under the puffed up bibs of the lay-away chickens. Softly clucking the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, so that they shouldn’t take fright, the close watching of the hen, her austere yellow-rimmed bead-eye, because she can be vicious and peck the hand that’s pilfering her eggs. Amongst the prickly-pear trees Agaat would have gone to look, behind the chicken run, under the pomegranate bushes, in the quince avenue, next to the old orchard. All the lay-away places she would have traced.
She carries the basket to the pantry, she takes the egg cartons off the shelf to fill them. How the good hand takes the red-brown eggs, the dunnish dust-brown ones, the small-yolked ones one-by-one out of the basket and assesses them, the largest apart, for selling in town, how she eases them into the little hollows, large ends downwards, half-dozens full. A quarter-hour chimes. From the time it takes, I guess that there are more than a dozen eggs today. Now she will write the date on the box, as we always did. What day would it be today?
A map of days, a calendar, that I have and that she writes on every day. But I can’t see that far any more. And what do I care for time? One day is like another in this decoction she has devised for me. Purgatory according to Agaat.
There was peace and tranquillity after Jakkie’s departure, after Jak’s death, for the first time in a long while on Grootmoedersdrift. Not an obdurate eye, not a hunched shoulder, and the mouth gentled for a change, the lips often livened up with a smile. How long was it, the truce? Five, six, seven years? Until I got sick, but the first year, year-and-a-half, while I could still move myself, with my walking sticks, with the walking frame, in the wheelchair, then still it was all love and harmony. I could hardly believe it, sheer bliss, I thought, Freuden sonder Zahl, to enjoy my old age with her. When did it change? When I could no longer speak, when I could no longer write, when I became completely helpless and had to come and lie here? Was it that that released the poison? That I was more dependent on her than I’d ever been? I’ve always been that, from the beginning. But with every step of my retrogression it felt to me she was becoming more rancorous, more furious. Had she pent it up all those years?
I hear her going back to the kitchen, I hear the water from the tap, that’s for filling the kettle for coffee. Her late-afternoon coffee so that she can remain awake for the evening shift. The silence while she drinks it. I can feel her thinking something, considering something. Then she comes down the passage, more slowly, stands still and turns back to the pantry.