Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Was it after that night, the night that everything changed between you?

Was it two days after that that Jak broke down?

That night, the night that elicited it all, that was in the time when you started fighting anew for your marriage, when Jakkie was starting to grow up and a playmate appeared at table from time to time. With all your might you tried to cultivate a more loving manner, for a year or more you’d consciously tried to look more kindly on Jak, also for Jakkie’s sake. He was quick to pick up tension between the two of you and then he would withdraw himself from everybody and everything except Agaat. Sensitive, just like you, was the child, even though in appearance he was Jak’s child in every respect. To and fro you could gaze at that time, at your husband at your child and back again. With Agaat following every movement of your eyes.

There is something to you, there must be something in there, you thought when you looked at Jak’s face. You refused afresh to accept that he was just a pretty shell. Late at night when you were on your own, you tried to get yourself in the mood with wine, with your old pieces of sheet music, accompaniments, almost forgotten, that you dug up out of the piano stool and played to yourself haltingly and sang to, after the example of the great singers on Pa’s old records, Ferrier, Flagstadt, Schwarzkopf. So, somewhat mellowed, you managed to go to Jak in his stoep room more regularly. You switched on his bedside lamp because you wanted him to look at you, at the new black nightgowns that you had ordered by post to save yourself embarrassment in the shops in town. Every time he had swept the switch back with the flat of his hand. And every time it had been a few minutes’ scuffle in the dark, without a word or a caress.

But you didn’t want to give up. You were alone, it felt worse in your forties than ever before. Not that Jak ever had a wandering eye as far as you were aware. But nor did he have an eye for you any more.

What year was it that night? Sixty-nine? Or was it nineteen seventy already, seventy-one?

It was an evening in early summer, October, you could hear the rushing of the drift, full after a good winter. You were standing on the stoep after everybody had gone to bed and you thought, Milla, is this what your life has come to? Your only child in a conspiracy of games and secret language with his nursemaid, your husband estranged from you in his own wing on the stoep. What have you retained of it all? Of your education, your music, your books? Only Grootmoedersdrift? And what good did it do you? All the struggling to get the farming going smoothly, only then to be left feeling so loveless and forlorn?

Just like your father, you thought. And just like your mother.

You caressed your own body. What a waste, you thought, what a pity.

You wouldn’t give in. You were different from her, different from them. You would make an extra effort.

That night it was.

You went and picked a bunch of blue larkspur and yellow fennel branches in the garden and arranged them in a vase, opened all the doors and windows of the house so that the sultry evening air could move freely through it, switched off all the lights and lit candles, opened a bottle of wine, took out the crystal glasses and went to have a bath, massaged your body with fragrant cream, brushed your hair in your new Liza Minnelli style that could best camouflage the shocks of hair and misplaced crowns on your head. You remember it, a touch of make-up around the eyes, the full-length satin petticoat. You looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror. The damage of years of demolition work was visible already, but like this, in a sentimental mood with a few glasses of wine in you, excited by the music, your face was soft, your lips relaxed, your eyelids seductive. You did not want to look at yourself for too long. You did not want to see what lay right under that voluptuous radiance. You were amazed that you could produce such an image at all.

The music you selected to suit your mood. Jak usually rolled his eyes at your music. A Strauss waltz he could just about tolerate. But this was not a night for Viennese waltzes, it was a night for violas, for mezzo-sopranos, for dark, melancholy sex.

What did you play that night on the old turntable? A cello sonata by Rachmaninoff? Lieder by Brahms? O komme, holde Sommernacht? Meine Liebe ist grün ? And lieder by Schubert and Schumann? Der Hirt auf dem Felsen? Widmung ?

Let me satiate myself with it, you thought, let me charge myself with all these subtle European yearnings. Let me ignite his blood with these melodies in my body, through osmosis.

What a massive over-estimation of yourself. To expect that you could attract him again after all the hard words, the slaps and the jibes and the grudge he bore you. To dream that surely there could someday be something more somewhere.

There was more to him. Much more than you could imagine at that stage.

That was your problem, Milla, a lack of imagination. You read him wrongly, looked past what was in him, you could assess him only in your terms, couldn’t imagine that anybody, even Jak, shouldn’t be able sometimes to yearn exactly like you — for tenderness, for excitement, for eyes mutually intoxicated.

How in God’s name did you conceive this notion?

Romantic German Lieder! That had much to do with it.

Sehnsucht. Lust. Wonne. Duft. The words alone had enchanted you as a student, the impossibly beautiful melodies. You would never recover from it. But wasn’t it a bit much to expect that you would, on wings of that kind of song, consent to being a muse for life in the Overberg the other side of Swellendam, to somebody, the son of a provincial doctor?

You were forty. You knew enough at that stage to be able to live with irony. You need only look around you and there were other realities, perhaps other songs that would be better suited to your world, other words to rhyme with and to sing.

Ewe, ram, kloof, buttermilk, barley, pizzle, ruttish, bluegum, wattle, lucerne flower, lark.

But that night irony was not in your repertoire. To you Grootmoedersdrift was all ‘rieselnder Quell’, all ‘flispernde Pappeln’, and in your slippery black satin garb you wandered through the sitting room to the left wing and pushed open Jak’s door and went to lie on top of him and kissed him in the neck gently.

He mumbled impatiently but it was clear that your advance had an effect on him. You unbuttoned his pyjamas and stroked his chest, you put your hand into his fly. You took his hand and pressed it between your legs so that he could feel your moist pubic hair.

Not that such doings had anything remotely to do with ‘Frauenliebe und — leben’ or a ‘girrendes Taubenpaar’, but you thought you knew how you had to handle him. You thought so.

Come to me, you whispered in his ear, come, I’m in the sitting room, I’m waiting for you.

You put on a new record, a selection of Schumann songs, and went to lie on the sofa with a glass of wine in your hand.

Maja of The Spout! If you think back on it now! What third-rate play-acting!

Jak appeared in the door sleepily. His hair was rumpled, his pyjamas unbuttoned, the state of his excitement evident.

Come here, you said, come taste this wine.

It’s the middle of the night, Jak said, you’ll wake up everybody.

You opened your arms to him.

Good Lord, Milla, why here? What’s got into you? Jak asked.

It was your reply that was wrong, your reply to the question of what had got into you.

Love, you said, love and longing for you.

You’re sozzled, that’s what, Jak said and gathered his pyjamas in front. He looked aside to where you’d placed the wine and the flowers on the table next to the silver candlesticks and shook his head.