Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

You got up and pressed yourself against his back and moved your hands along his flanks.

What’s with you? Are you randy all of a sudden because you’re in love with somebody else? Jak asked. What would make me good enough all of a sudden, it’s not as if I can do anything right in your eyes, is it?

Don’t talk like that, you pleaded, you know there’s always been only one man in my life.

Jak snorted, took the wine out of the ice bucket, looked at the label, took a long draught from the bottle and put it back.

Do you really not love me at all any more then, Jakop, you asked in his ear, just say that you love me, just hold me.

Why did that infuriate him so?

He turned round and grabbed you by the shoulders.

You, he said, you with your needle-sharp intellect and tongue to match, you’ve always been too simple-minded to understand that it doesn’t work like that. Love is not something one asks for.

But you never give it to me, I do so long for it, I’m alone, Jak, I need you.

He let go of you and waved his hands about his head.

Jak, you said, smell the night, and went and stood in front of him and moved your pelvis against his.

We’ve made everything on the farm as we want it, can’t we also try to make each other happy?

You took his hard penis in your hand. He pushed you away.

Leave me alone dammit, he swore, I’m not your toolbox!

You let the straps of your petticoat slip down your shoulders and pressed your breasts against him.

No! he said, no, Milla! and pushed you away, stood away from you, glared at you until you covered yourself with your hands. At last you could no longer bear his stare. You lowered your face into your hands. You collapsed onto the sofa.

Just tell me what I do wrong, you sobbed, I no longer know. .

What you do wrong?! No, my dear Milla, you do everything perfectly right, all the way to the stage swoon, let there be no mistake about that. Right, I’ll tell you what I think. You think I’m stupid. You think you can play with me. Who do you want to look like in all your silly get-ups? Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Some Like it Hot ? It doesn’t work, you know. A bloody scrap of black lace, after all the years of breaking me down and disparaging me. I’d rather go and pull my own wire, thank you!

No names, no roll-call, he said, and turned round.

Jak, wait, you said, but he wouldn’t hear you.

Jak, wait! he mimicked you in a whingeing voice, and gave the dining-room table a shove. You nauseate me, that’s what, I puke from your affectations.

With a hiccup the table rolled off the edge of the carpet, the bottle of Nederburg Rhine Riesling chinking in the wine holder, the larkspur trembling in the vase, the candle flame juddering in the candlesticks. Jak gave it another hard shove. As far as the furthest wall of the sitting room it rolled, past the half-moon table with the white swans of blown glass, and stopped next to the gramophone under the portrait of your great-great-grandmother.

Poor Jak de Wet, look at him, see what his wife has made of him, Jak said, as if addressing the portrait. First the stud bull. Then the obelisk. What dost thou say, O Great-great-grandmother? You are after all the origin of the world around here!

Jak kicked against the table-leg. The table bumped against the wall. The ice bucket fell down and the bottle broke. The record got stuck. You saw the needle in the pick-up head slide and bounce over the grooves. Will you ever forget the disfigured song, the treacherous smell of fennel?

Du meine Seele, du mein Herz Herz Herz Herz,

Du meine Wonn’, o du mein mein mein Schmerz,

Du meine Welt, in der in der in der in der ich lebe,

Mein Hi Hi Hi Himmel du, darein ich schwebe be be. .

Was that when you saw Agaat standing in the door? Could you read her face? She was half in the shadows. You saw her eyes shine.

Go away! you signalled with your eyes, what are you doing here? Vanish!

She resisted you. There she was, in the middle of the night, perfectly pleated, cap and apron and all, reporting from the backyard. She was barefoot. With an unfathomable countenance she stood there, broom and scoop ready in hand, and listened out the last phrases of the song.

Du hebst mich liebend über mich,

Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich!

Soundlessly she approached and lifted the needle off the record, replaced it on its cradle.

How much had she heard? Had Jak heard her come in by the back door before you saw her?

Aha, the stage hand, Jak said, like a moth to the flame. He took one pace, stepped on a shard and swore, lifted his foot over his knee and removed a piece of glass.

On his way out he rolled the wine cooler towards Agaat.

Let the one foot not know what’s befallen the other, he said, please do see to it that she cleans it all up nicely for you here, Mrs de Wet, and kindly make sure that she puts on shoes, otherwise she’s liable also to tread on a splinter.

You remained sitting on the sofa with your head in your hands, listened to Agaat sweeping up the glass, packing away the records in the shelf and the music books in the lid of the piano stool, leaving by the back door, without a word.

That was the last time, you decided, that German music would land you in a farce in your own sitting room.

That was how you dismissed it. A farce.

What Jak said, all the terrible words, and what Agaat could have heard, that you banished from your thoughts.

But that was not the end of the German problems. The Simmentals were next and they came up for discussion two evenings later.

You could see all the time that Jak was upset about the night of the music, but it was too difficult to talk about it. And there was Agaat’s presence, whiter than snow spotlessly whitewashed and mockingly correct and attentive. You certainly didn’t want to add fuel to her flame.

How did it begin? It was before supper even, when you remarked in the bathroom that you were tired. All day long you’d helped with the spraying against fruit-fly in the old orchard and afterwards saw to it that the anchor-poles were treated properly with rust-repellent undercoat and silver paint and that the young ewes were dipped against blowfly, all the absolutely essential maintenance on the farm of which Jak took very little notice.

Tired! he shouted from under the shower, it’s more than tiredness that’s wrong with you, you’re not all there, that’s what, it’s work, work, work as if you’re being driven by the devil and it must be this and not that, all the time with your melancholy mug and the whingeing and the whining, help me here, help me there, I can’t do everything on my own. And when midnight strikes, then you’re transfigured into the great seductress, half-naked tarted up with your wine and your candles and your stupid music, and keep me from sleep, what’s the matter with you? Do you think you’re Marilyn Monroe on a Texas ranch?

You looked at the sinewy muscles of his arms as he dried himself. Something about his hard body, something about the emaciated appearance of his ankles and wrists disturbed you, as if his joints were under extreme pressure.

It’s because there’s always too much happening on the farm, he said, this is not a damned experimental farm.

You knew where this was heading. That was always his defence when you pointed out on your statements how much money was being wasted on Grootmoedersdrift, through sheer neglect, through the wrong purchases, through cattle diseases that could have been prevented with the right care. He got angry when you brought it to his attention, the proof of squandering. The seeder with the disks instead of teeth that he’d bought, when you’d told him all the time, disks don’t work on shale, the stones get stuck in them and then the disks drag, wear away on one side and then the whole thing’s gone to glory, the rowels that he never remembered to remove from the hoppers after sowing-time, so that they were rusted through from the guano remains when sowing-time came round again. And if only it had stopped there, with neglected machinery, but then there was the mastitis problem with the Jersey cows. Isolate the sick animals, Jak, remember the walk-through foot-bath at the entrance to the stables, strain the first milk from every cow every day, you had to insist time and time again without his ever paying any attention to your words.