Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Did I think it all up? Such a bare shoulder you could surely not dream up? Such a chair? There it looms in the middle of the room, a throne of black leather and chrome, the embroidery heaped up on the seat. Like a burnished throne.

I’m not dreaming now, I’m wide awake. It’s morning, I smell the garden, I see the hydrangea arrangement. I remember. Over there in the corner stands the duster where Agaat has just put it down.

PR•A•Y, I spelled.

Pray, she repeated, with the trace of a question in it. She’s waiting for me to speak more. How can I explain why I want a prayer to be said? A way in it is, a snare. How else am I to find out what she’s turning over in her mind? Where she went to in the night?

Three times I was aware of her standing next to my bed in the dark. After the last time I heard her go out at the back. But I didn’t hear the outside room’s door open. It was the door of the storeroom. I heard something fall, a clattering of spades and tools, a muffled exclamation. And then nothing, only the wind, and floating on it a rumour, an image, an intimation of discord, of lamentation, of a beating of the breast, the white cross straining across shoulders, screams in the night, against the red stones, in the red dust of summer, a shaking of the firmament, a star shower, a dark glow from the mountain, a weal across the eye, across the cheek, a burning grey bloom, but not my own tears. Old as the bloom on black-ripe Christmas plums it was, soft and powerful. I heard the dogs bark, in the distance, high up, from across the river, from the direction of the mountain. Boela’s bark, Koffie’s bark, upset, deranged, a barking after whatever possesses human beings.

Pray for me, Agaat, pray for whatever possesses human beings. Pray for the last plum season that I shall live to see.

You can’t prescribe people’s prayers.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation. And forgive us our trespasses.

How simple that sounds, but who leads whom and who trespasses against whom here?

Why create a temptable human being?

Forty days in the wilderness! Here it is, marked down for me in the calendar. 6 November to 16 December. The calendar is clamped fast to the reading stand, over the commission, over the symptoms and their futile bygone treatment.

Forty days. All the kingdoms of the world, if thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. That she read from the Bible. When? Yesterday afternoon?

If thou therefore wilt worship me, shall be thine? What’s that supposed to mean? Does she think she’s Beelzebub?

I have two days left to make a full forty. How many quarter-hours is that? I can’t count any more, the dark and the light hours, the ray of sun on the altar. Sixteen December is circled. The Day of the Covenant, the Day of Reconciliation.

An affirmative calendar! Can anybody be so deliberate! So pathetic? So literal! Or is it pure coincidence? Is everything that’s happened here pure coincidence? Is it only I who dreamed up the causes and the effects, the reasons and the grounds? And she who rearranged them? Because without that one cannot live and cannot die?

Pray for me, Agaat, wipe the grey bloom from my cheek, from your cheek. There is a possibility of lustre. The black-ripe fruit. The sweet moisture. Wipe the bloom on your sleeve. Let there be radiance.

What are you doing there in front of the mirror?

Are you verily rolling up your sleeve in front of me again?

Why the exposure all the time? What am I supposed to see that I haven’t seen yet? I know it, don’t I. Your deformed arm. I brought you up, didn’t I?

Your right sleeve, up, further up, over that shrunken hand of yours. Over that thin straight little forearm, bare as a crowbar? The round elbow a length of bent copper tubing? A brazen snake in the desert? Are you raising it above me? Your black sleeve, rolled up as far as your armpit, for a clean blow, for a straight strike? At which part of me are you going to aim? Are you going to penetrate me with it? Through the heart? With the same arm that made me pity you in the first instance?

One shouldn’t pity deformities! Every deformity is a weapon, a lever, the seat of power and devastation.

Is that what you’re trying to get across to me?

She holds the arm athwart her face. She turns it, moves it down. A fencing foil. One pace back she takes, one pace forward. Dip at the knees! Up jerks the shoulder!

Before the railings of my bed.

As on the moonlit night of the burial of the heart.

As in the Tradouw with the umbilical cord that jerks, the rope from which the child is suspended.

As before the sick bull in the holding pen.

As before the foaming waves of Witsand in the black bathing costume.

Low she keeps.

High she aims.

Does she want to charge?

Does she want to kneel?

Does she want to be assumed in glory?

What convulsion of self-exposure, what furious salutation is this?

No, she puts her knuckle in her mouth.

She takes her knuckle out of her mouth. She has broken the skin. Blood flows from it.

On this fragrant morning before my unbalanced gaze she prays.

Lord God in heaven, comes her voice.

Hear me!

Foot-rot!

Stinking smut!

She dips her head, the white cap casts a splash against the mirror.

Pip!

Roup!

Glanders!

Greasy heel!

Contagious abortion!

Waterpepper knotweed!

Who do I have other than you? Don’t go away from me! Don’t leave me! What would I ever do without you, with my words?

I’m looking for the suitcase!

Have mercy on me!

For thy Name’s sake.

Amen.

January ’84. You and Jak got a special invitation to attend the medal parade at Ysterplaat. The Air Force crest was thickly embossed on the card. The instruction was that the guests of honour should be formally dressed. Ladies requested to wear head-covering and gloves . After the ceremony a lunch with choral song in a hall and in the afternoon a military air show. Jakkie would sing and form part of a formation-flight squadron. He’d already informed you himself of the event just after returning from Operation Askari where they’d bombed the shit and toe-nails out of the Cubans, as Jak put it.

Jak came to press the card into your hand in the garden where you and Agaat were giving the roses a summer pruning.

First order, gold, Cross of Honour for outstanding service, leadership and bravery in specialised high-risk warfare, he read.

You passed the card to Agaat. Her mouth was set in a line, a flickering of eyelids. She said nothing.

You’d noticed, by then for more than a year, that Jakkie was no longer replying so regularly to her letters. You read her objections to this, she knew that her letters were now destined for your eyes as well. She taunted you in every intercepted letter.

I understand if you’re too busy to write back, Captain, in that case just send a card to say that you’re still alive, or make the phone ring three times to say you’re thinking of me, your mother and I will know it’s you.

To that there was in fact a reply, over Christmas, 1983 it was.

It was quite a thick letter delivered by hand by a fellow-pilot of Jakkie’s passing through on leave. On the front it said only Gaat . It had a blob of red sealing wax on the back. For Mr and Mrs J.C. de Wet there was an envelope with four photos with writing on the back, swift hard scribbles with a ballpoint pen. Over and over you switched the photos and read, over and over Agaat took them from you and read. What were the two of you supposed to do with it? Fierce was the writing: Rambo de Wet next to his Impala after he’d bombed FAPLA positions at Mulondo on 23 December ’83. Could see f-all of the cumulonimbus almost came a cropper. Sh-tting myself with the SAM’s left and right round my head, one Impala shot in the tail but landed safely at Ondongwa, your own little Rambo also hit by a SAM-7, had to land at Ongiva, fortunately they’d fixed the landing strip there a few weeks earlier otherwise he’d definitely have seen his arse.