Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

27 January

I no longer have to lock her up all the time during the day. She follows me everywhere. Are you my tail, I ask? She only looks for my eyes. I show her in my picture book: Horse’s tail, pig’s tail, sheep’s tail, dog’s tail. There is a little finger pointing now, with its own will and purpose. Horse’s eye, pig’s eye, sheep’s eye, dog’s eye, she shows. I leave the books with her in the room. She pages for herself when I don’t look, but with such cautious fingers as if the pages are scorching her.

30 January

First day without nappy and without accident. This morning there was pee in the pot, so she must have got up by herself in the night, or early this morning. Saar says she poos in the garden when we’re not looking.

Don’t poo in the garden, Aspatat, I say, you’ll get worms again, poo in your pot otherwise you’re not getting any jelly.

1 February

Jelly threat works well. For two days didn’t get any jelly. Comes into the kitchen today to show me with the eyes: Come and see! Come and see! until I follow her down the passage. Look! the eyes signal. Look! the protruding finger points. A fine turd in the pot it was!

Oh sis! I say, one doesn’t show people one’s poo, it’s impolite, you say nicely: Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom, and you do your number two nicely and wipe your tail nicely and then you get jelly. Now you’ve pooed in the pot nicely, but don’t think it’s that easy, jelly you’ll get when you’ve learnt to speak nice full sentences.

Then it looked at the ground and jutted out the chin! First sulk! First clear facial expression to play on my feelings! It excited me very much, but I can’t show it. Tidy up your face, then you’ll have jelly, I say. Then she rearranged the face and looked me straight in the eye, ever so sanctimonious. I had to look away. Couldn’t help wanting to laugh. Just like a little puppy that begs even though she knows she’s not allowed to.

5 February

Is eating well now, every day. Chicken and vegetables, with the hands when I’m not looking. First little slice of brown bread as well. Just has to be hungry enough. Doesn’t want to handle cutlery herself yet. Just as if she doesn’t want the insides of her hands to be seen. A few times already I’ve forced open the hands, pressed in the palms, felt through all knucklebones, couldn’t feel anything wrong, except that the small hand is colder and limper. Perhaps also it’s just become lazy, from being hidden all the time and never being used, the little arm though is clearly deformed.

You could fold the pink sweet’s wrapper, I say, don’t think I didn’t see it. You can do everything with those little hands of yours. She just stares at me with big eyes.

6 February

I open the little weak hand and put the hand-bell in it, I shake it with my hand folded around hers, but when I let go, she drops the bell.

7 February

Devised a little game, call-each-other-with-bells. I take the bronze bell and she has the silver one with her in the room. If she answers my ringing with her ringing, I’ll unlock the door of her room, I say. I ring it in the kitchen and creep closer and peep through the slot. What would make her so scared of picking up something, I wonder? She sits and just looks at the bell, does though hold it now for a few seconds if I put it in her deformed hand. We’re going to make it strong, I say, we’re going to make it clever just like your other hand, we’re going to exercise it and give it nice things to do every day.

8 February

Went to see Ds van der Lught in town this morning. Quite patient and fatherly. It’s a very big responsibility, he says, but the Lord put it in your way to teach you patience and humility.

Only over tea could I bring myself to touch on the matter of the name. The nicknames with which she grew up in her own home, he just shook his head, was immediately very helpful, took thick reference books off his shelf. ‘Agaat’ he suggested then. Odd name, don’t know it at all, but then he explained, it’s Dutch for Agatha, it’s close to the sound of Asgat with the guttural ‘g’, it’s a semi-precious stone, I say, quite, he says, you only see the value of it if it’s correctly polished, but that’s not all, look with me in the book here, it’s from the Greek ‘agathos’ which means ‘good’. And if your name is good, he says, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like a holy brand it will be, like an immanent destiny, the name on the brow, to do good, to want to be good, goodness itself. We’ll have her baptised accordingly when she’s a bit bigger, when she can understand what’s happening to her, he says. Then we knelt and he prayed for me and for Agaat and the commission I’d accepted and he thanked the Lord for another heathen soul added to the flock by the good works of a devoted child of God, a stalk gathered into the sheaf.

I must write the commission as Dominee helped me to clarify it today. My task and vocation with this. Now I no longer feel so alone with it. And I must write up the beginning, the beginning of everything, before I forget the feeling, of how I found her and knew she was mine.

P·R·A·Y I make Agaat spell. P tap R tap A tap Y tap, that’s right, P·R·A·Y.

I do it with the left eye. It’s the only one that can still blink. The other one, the right, has started staring, overnight. Or a few nights ago? How long have I slept?

I no longer know. I drift off without knowing, I dream I come to and it’s another day’s evening or two afternoons later. All that I know is that the winking-reflex is gone in my right eye, all that I feel is a faint spasm now and again round the eyeball, but the eyelids no longer move.

Now Agaat comes and with the fingers of her small hand she presses the lower lid up to keep the eye moist. But I know what she thinks would be preferable. I can see it in her face, that jaw. She’ll stick down the staring eye with a wad of cotton wool and a plaster.

Nobody can want to wink someone else’s eye for her.

Enough is enough.

How to make peace with one eye, an unfathomable interpreter and the alphabet? If peace it can be called.

Can I make it with her?

We could make a flower garden. She dug up a photo here that Dawid still took of us, when the trellising for the rambling roses was put up. Our faces, Agaat’s and mine, elated with working and planning. We’re standing there amongst the holes and the trenches and the heaps of soil, but we look as if we can already see everything in flower.

Could one hope for more, after all?

I smell the gillyflowers, the wild pinks through the open door.

Would that have to be peace enough for us? The paradisiacal garden?

Next to me is the large hydrangea arrangement. How long have I been sleeping? Two days? Three? Four? This morning she gave the flowers a look that I know but too well. Past their prime. One day more. Then they have to get out of here. Onto the compost heap. Ready to be dug in.

Pray, she repeats my first word of the talking-hour. A light touch of disbelief I discern there.

She steps back from the board, places the duster in the corner. There’s a red streak of dust on her sock. Her cap is skew. Where was she again in the night? She turns to the mirror. Arms by the sides. Then she lifts her hands. But they don’t go to her head. It’s not to pin her cap straight. She regards herself with her hands in the air. Outnumbered, it says. Surrender.

P·R·A·Y, I asked. It’s the only opening I can devise to initiate what I want to plead for. Don’t throw them out. Our blue-purple hydrangeas. Don’t throw yourself out, and me neither. Hold us for a while yet. There is beauty also in flowers that fade. Their last hour provides stuff for contemplation. Contemplate it for me. For whom do you in any case want to refresh the vase? It’s our last flower arrangement with a history in this room. Remember, you salvaged the vase. And stuck it together. And it never leaked.