Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

She looked you straight in the eye, her body ramrod-stiff. You could see the hurt settling in her gaze. On top of the poker face, a film of aggrievedness. More than that.

He screws a pipe into the front of the rifle’s barrel, she said, her voice neutral.

You let her go, she retreated. When she spoke it was soft, but clear and controlled.

I saw it yesterday for the first time. All you hear is thud like a bag of salt falling off a wagon. But I know what it sounds like now. From now on I’ll know to listen for it.

Don’t let him see you, Agaat.

You are my eyes and my ears, you wanted to say, he knows in the long run I find out everything, but just don’t let him discover that you’re spying on him.

You were silent, blew your nose. Her gaze forbade you to say anything further.

You should have said you were sorry you scolded so viciously. You should have said you would be more alert yourself. Never mind, it’s not your fault, Agaat, you should have said, you’re with Jakkie all day, how could you know what was happening in the fields? But you didn’t. You stepped past her, your hands to your face. Shattered because of the cows. Over those injured eyes of Agaat’s you stepped. Right over the insinuation flickering in that eye.

Must I see the germs even before they hatch? Must I keep death itself from your body? There was reproach on her face.

Sobering it was.

You gathered yourself. Saw to it that the old bones and tins and cartridge-shells and rusted wires and everything on the old grazings next to the river were cleared up. Jak trembled with dismay when he heard the name of the sickness. He buckled down and helped. You controlled yourself, said if it was really necessary, then he should go and lay out a proper shooting-range with real targets at the back of the fallow land in a special camp where he would be out of the way of man and beast. There would never again be a single thing shot and left lying in the veld, you said.

You immediately started administering bonemeal with the salt, for the sheep as well, and gave instructions for the making of new little troughs that would ensure that each head of cattle would get its eight ounces.

You got in a team of convicts and had the whole farm, next to the rivers and on the side of the drift, scoured for bones. More than a hundred bags full were collected.

You wouldn’t forget that, the shaven heads of the men as they moved stooped down in a slow phalanx before Agaat’s white apron over the lands. The old hymns there on the fallow, carried by the wind, you could hear them as far as the yard, Agaat’s descant high and bright above the deep voices of the men.

From depth of dark’st disgrace

of deliverance bereft

where hope’s forlorn last trace

in despair my heart has left;

from depths of desolation

oh Lord, I b’seech thee, hear,

and let my lamentation

ascend, Lord, in thine ear!

Everybody was flabbergasted. Cows that eat skeletons. As if death itself had nutritional value. Even Saar and Lietja who could produce a ribald laugh on any occasion, stood there in the kitchen singing, dragging it out with that lugubrious bending of the notes that the brown people could give to a song. A weeping and wailing it was in those days on Grootmoedersdrift, as the wagons full of white bones arrived in the yard. And as the digging of the trenches began and the skeletons of skunks and meerkat and guineafowl, and the carcasses of cattle, were cast into them, Agaat led the workers in the singing of another verse.

Hope, Israel in your sorrow,

trust, o nation that grieves;

His favour light’ns the morrow,

His grace your grief reprieves.

Then shines a sweet salvation:

all Israel is free

of trial and tribulation.

Do like, Lord, unto me!

It set you crying all over again. For more than the cows. For Agaat’s eye that was dry and sharp with supervising. In her mouth it was a battle hymn, that you could hear, and it was directed at you and you felt how she was piling up her case against you. It was a case for which she could locate her injustice in the very hymns of your own church, in the very mouths of the prophets of the Old Testament.

Did she have everybody on her side even then?

Jak could in any case not endure it too long under Agaat and her convicts. He left his bag of bones and tried to assist the vet. You yourself tried to hurry along the bone-collecting. If the singing were to carry on any longer, you felt, the walls of the homestead would tumble down like those of Jericho.

The bonemeal feeds that you administered helped to get the oxen, the bulls and the cows that had not given birth that year back into condition. But the best dairy cows, all of those that would have calved that season and that had been put to graze in the little back camp next to the river, were lost.

Three days long the deaths continued. Over and over the process repeated itself, the staggering gait with which it started, the glassy stare, the puzzled gaze, the drooping ears, the tangled coat, and the dried-up nostrils. One after the other they lay down. One by one the heads became too heavy there where they were lying in the grass. They turned their noses into their flanks trying to support their heads. The flanks collapsed. The jaws were paralysed, the tips of the tongues lolled on the teeth in front, drool and foam glistened around the mouths, heavily the great brown gullets moved up and down. One after the other soft, pining death you accompanied, your hand on the flank, your hand on the little crown between the ears. You wept by your cows. The best of them were descendants of the animals you had known as a child. Aandster’s great-great-grandchild, Pieternella’s distant cousins, all the meek caramel-coloured mothers.

When the convicts had gone and all the cows were buried, Agaat came to you. She came to sit by you in your room with Jakkie drinking his bottle in her arms. She put the old green Handbook on your lap. Her voice was neutral. Her eyes shone.

Open on page 221, she said, open, and ask me anything, I am fully learned now, about anything that can possibly happen to a cow.

the countenance of doctors is the seat of dissimulation the whispered consultation behind the screens i don’t add up on any side am wrong geometry am failed electricity am vapour before the sun am nothing more than particles and waves my irradiated skeleton a room-divider my head in a tunnel my neck in a hole my leg in a bath my arms weightless groping for nothing in sleeves of lead in cylinders full of pink water wild and waste is death before death in a solution of salts i am dipped painted with mediums contending for dominance water earth fire and air a quadruple judgement hangs over my neck invisible eels prick the skin of the fingertips skin that provisionally enshrouds my failure a fascicle of breath engirdled by fate against him the intact the voluble the preserved in his coat of whitewash i fear mrs de wet the worst oh my soul you are audited by a battery of stethoscopes gallery of savants who are gauging the woman who cannot break an egg the woman who cannot sweep with a broom the one in hundredthousand mrs de wet oh genuflecting deeply edified congregation of god in swellendam all in the twinkling of an eye compassionate in tones of gloating resounds the intercession she must fall safely as rain in winter o Lord must descend soughing like a manna of edible butterflies while silent assistants connect me to electrodes transilluminate me weigh me the specific gravity of my spirit which i must surrender if i correctly understand the explanation of gradual enfeeblement on the dials of the control panels of the angels with flaming swords the electromyographers their needles in my flesh they whisper in unison the sickness of charcot the sickness of lou gehrig now the sickness of Grootmoedersdrift the mother of all sicknesses you are besieged in your head a tongueless bunker with loopholes