Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

The chickens would lay chocolates, the chimneys would start whistling, Jakkie laughed, relieved to be joking. He was in his father’s team now.

Yes, you see, he knows it already, Jak said, the windows would bulge out, the windmills would run off, the goffels would cut out each other’s goolies, the rams would cover the women. These two bat pilots don’t dare look away for a moment. Just look at their control panel!

Jak was on a roll, with hands and feet he demonstrated.

Air pressure, altitude, tail-wind, cruising speed, wheels, wings, long-drop, snot-smear, squitter straight into the drift!

Jakkie roared with laughter.

Or is it a stupid old ship they’re steering, Jakkie, port, starboard, goose-turd, sink!

There was nothing you could do about it.

Nothing Agaat could or would do about it.

But in whose team was she? you wondered. Perhaps ‘team’ was the wrong word, she wasn’t in a team, a pivot she was, a kingpin, you’d felt for a while now how the parts gyrated around her, faster and faster, even though she was the least.

We’re going along, you said again.

You two, said Jak, you stay exactly where you are and see to it that the bluegums don’t contract typhus, and that Grootmoedersdrift doesn’t disappear down a sinkhole, not so, Jakkie? And on Saturday 18 September you see to it that you’re waiting for us in the pass with food and coffee and clothes. Come in the red bakkie so that we can see you clearly from up there.

It rained on the Saturday when you and Agaat had to go and fetch them. The whole week that they were gone you’d smelt it coming on, heard the susurration before the first drops fell. A countrywide rain it would become, as one could expect at that season in the south-western districts. Slippery the rock faces would be, the peaks covered in mist, the kloofs full of waterfalls. Agaat embroidered day and night, the big abstract rainbow cloth on which she’d worked over the years when she was troubled. The work was completed the day before you were due to depart. She came and draped it in front of you like an omen. But it was only an empty cloth.

You’d phoned rescue teams earlier in the week already and explained Jak and Jakkie’s route to them. You’d found out about helicopters at Swellengrebel aerodrome. The more you thought about it the more you reproached yourself for not objecting more vehemently. It was ill-considered, altogether 80 kilometres over mountaintops and kloofs and through rivers. You couldn’t believe that you’d permitted it.

Take more people along, take a radio, you had pleaded two days before their departure. At the last moment, when you went to drop them off, you put a little mirror in Jak’s hand, offered to go and make appointments with farmers at the foot of the mountain to look for signals at a certain hour so that you would at least know where they were.

You want to be in a play, Milla, Jak had said, willy-nilly you must have a drama where there’s none, with yourself in the lead. Plus a banner headline: ‘Woman loses husband and only son in mountaineering tragedy’. The world as it is, is not enough for you, my wife. That’s your problem. You’re like the hungry cow in that children’s book of Jakkie’s. You bring misfortune down upon yourself, and upon me, upon us all here, it’s you who needs the mirror, not me.

He pressed it back into your hands. His eyes flickered. In the back seat Agaat and Jakkie sat and took it all in.

The Saturday, a week later, the dark morning of rain. You didn’t dare go look for Agaat in her room once again. All week while you were waiting, she was stony and taciturn, came and showed you the rainbow cloth once more, with an odd sentence added to it.

Break and be broken, she said, that is the law of life.

You knew better than to ask her what she meant.

Her other intentions were crystal-clear. She ordered you around with a list in her hand. You did what she said, you were too numbed with nerves to think straight. Blankets and towels and warm clothes she packed and thermos flasks of sweet black coffee. Barley water with sugar and salt such as she always gave to the diarrhoea babies down in the cottages. The first-aid chest. Extra bandages. Brandy. She made sandwiches, frikkadels, hard-boiled eggs, a bottle of preserved quinces, cookies, rice pudding, cinnamon sugar, sago pudding, custard.

They’ll be as hungry as wolves she said and then they must start with mushy foods first.

You regarded her actions. The mugs, the plates, the spoons that she packed in the basket. Three of each and her own enamel plate and mug.

What if they don’t come? you asked, what if you wait there all day till evening and they don’t turn up?

Oh God our help in ages past, Agaat said.

The tone of her voice had little to do with God, and her ‘our’ didn’t invite company.

She got Dawid to put the canopy on the bakkie and laid a single mattress in the back. You’d spend the night there if they didn’t turn up, she decided, you in the back and she in front. You’d have to wait there until they arrived. She had a bag of wood dragged up for a fire in case it should be necessary. You started trembling as you were loading the stuff in the half-light of dawn. You realised you were furious, more furious than you’d ever been in your life, at what Jak had done to you. But your fury was without expression, like a thin cord inside you it was. You couldn’t utter it, you would have screamed if you could, you would have cursed, but nothing issued from you. Agaat came and stood by you with one of your green pills in her palm and a glass of water.

Drink that, she said, you’ve got the proper heebie-jeebies.

What if. . you began.

If me no ifs, Agaat said.

She was curt. You knew how she felt. You thought you knew. It would break her heart if anything were to happen to Jakkie.

But there was something else as well. Contempt. For what you’d permitted Jak to do to you. Rebellion because her hands were tied.

It was still twilight when you stopped to wait just beyond the bridge in the first lay-by. The idea was that they would appear there on the other side, on the skyline, and attract your attention and then move on along the horizon all the way to the descent.

As the light grew, Agaat started thinking you might have just missed them. You drove on to a place on the pass where you estimated that they’d have a better chance of seeing you, right opposite a kloof that they would have to cross on the horizon if they’d kept to the plan. The weather was blue with wind and water. A drifting mist covered the top of the lip of the cliff. A white streak of water was rushing down the seam. Lower down it dispersed, a fine spray down in the undergrowth, on either side the claws of a lion, as you as a child had learnt the formation of the foothills from your father, the roundings of the paws yellow with bitou-bush and then the toes, the shiny black rock-nails in the black water.

Now and again a glimmering flushed behind the clouds intensifying the colours of the rock faces. It felt as if you were peering though thick glass. No doubt because of the tranquilliser you’d swallowed, but also from the tension of having to wait there. The landscape was shallow and empty, the smell you got was of cold sheets, of black water and granite.

To and fro you and Agaat passed the binoculars between you. You had to adjust them constantly because your vision was weak in different ways, you near-sighted and Agaat far-sighted.

You couldn’t find anything with the binoculars in the descending mist, tumbling down and down in the black undergrowth of the kloof. Once you saw in the grooves of the rocks your father’s face, the sharp nose, the notch between the eyes, the sad expression around the mouth. Time and again you had to take the binoculars away from your face to try and see where you were. Later you gave up completely, just kept looking purposelessly until Agaat pulled at the cords to claim her turn. Without a word she buffed the lenses dry every time with the long sleeve of her jersey.