Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

14 March, seven o’clock

Agaat can talk! So I wasn’t wrong about the whispering! She talks to herself in bed but I can’t make out what. The whispering is on the in-breath. I see the little chest swell as she takes the breath. Have just gone to press my ear against the slot, a rustling of little sentences, almost voiced, repetition of the same word or phrases, but I only now and again catch something. The rhymes I say to her all the time? Fragments of the stories that I tell? Granny, why are Granny’s ears so big, Granny, why are Granny’s teeth so long. I know she understands. When I’m telling a story, she looks at me wide-eyed. Sometimes I get the impression she’s on the point of asking me something about the stories. But it’s as if she’s assessing me, as if she’s scared that I’m going to take something from her if she opens her mouth.

Quarter past seven

I could spoil everything if I exert pressure now. Have been to listen at the door of the back room again, this time it was unmistakable. What do I hear there?

In the road is a hole, in the hole is a stone, in the stone is a sound. In one sustained in-breath she said the riddle!

Her finger was on the tip of her tongue, as I always have it when I’m saying the riddle to entice her to talk, as if language is something one can taste.

I went to sit on the side of her bed. I won’t look, I whispered, I look elsewhere, then you tell me what you lie here and say to yourself, won’t you? I swung my legs onto the bed so that I could lean against the bedpost, tried to relax, so that she could relax as well. Wanted her half to forget that I was there and just carry on with her bedtime stories. Sat there for probably an hour without saying anything. She said nothing further but that’s the best that I’ve yet felt with her. Peaceful. Secure. A kind of motherhood even.

Half past eight

Sat on the stoep for a long time, tried to think of everything that happened there in Agaat’s little back room tonight. It’s as if I’m too scared to write it down. As if writing would efface the fragile event, as if words would spoil everything.

It smelt sweet there with her in the little bed. Agaat’s breath, her little body smell sweet nowadays. All the sores and ringworms have healed, the bad teeth have been pulled, she eats well and sleeps well, has regular bowel movements, has a bath every evening. Not at all as hunched up and bewildered as at first. Sweet, like a little rabbit. And then there was also the twig of fennel that she’d picked this afternoon that I’d put in a little jar next to her bed. I picked a leaf and crushed it between my fingers and smelt it and made her smell it too. Dreamy the little eyes were in mine, they half closed from the aroma. If she were to say something, I thought to myself, it would be because she was almost asleep.

I wanted to press her to me. But that’s against the rules.

Twenty to nine

And then!

My hand trembles to write it.

Then I bent down and whispered in her ear.

What did I say to her?

Ten to nine

I’m so hungry, I’m so thirsty, I said, because you don’t want to talk to me and I know you can talk, because I hear you, through the hole in the door, how you talk to yourself in bed and I see your lips move and I wonder what you’re saying.

I knelt by the bedside.

Perhaps you can say your new name for me?

I blinked with my eyes to ask, big please!

Twenty past nine

Why is it taking me so long to write it up? I’d rather just think about it again and again. It’s too precious! It’s too fine! Words spoil it. Who could understand?

I held my ear right next to her mouth, a good ten minutes long I breathed in her little fennel breath.

I imagined the tip of her will as the rolled-up tip of a fern. Did I say it out loud? That she should also imagine it? A tender green ringlet with little folded-in fingers?

I bent it open with my attention.

Then it came into my ear, like the rushing of my own blood, against the deep end of the roof of her mouth, a gentle guttural-fricative, the sound of a shell against my ear, the g-g-g of Agaat.

I felt faint, lowered my head on her chest.

Fast asleep she was when I lifted my head. I must have slumbered off myself. Had I dreamt it all?

When I got up, she opened her eyes. I opened my mouth to say her name.

Then she also opened her mouth.

Then we said her name at the same time. Sweet, full in my mouth, like a mouthful of something heavenly. Lord my God, the child You have given me.

Ten o’clock

Still I have the feeling of satiety. Now still as I’m writing here, hour upon hour, I feel it, a tingling fulfilled feeling through my whole body, as I imagine it must feel to suckle a child. Can it be that you feed someone else and feel replete yourself with it?

Perhaps it’s the mere fact that she could go to sleep with me so close to her that makes me feel like this.

It’s the first time in my life that I understand it like this, the impersonal unity of all living things. It doesn’t matter who is who. The speaker and the listener. The shell and the sea, the mother cat and the human hand that stirs her blind litter, the wind and the soughing pine, the dry drift and the flood. It’s one energy. We are one, Agaat and I, I feel it stir in my navel.

17 March 1954

Agaat spoke to me again! Admittedly through a closed door, but still! First we played the knock-knock rhyme, on either side of the door, I say the words and she knocks the rhythm.

She looks for her man

and she looks for her child

her patience is thin

and her eyes are wild

she knock-knocks!

she knock-knocks!

knock-knock!

knock-knock!

By the second verse I hear another voice beneath mine.

She knocks with her body

To know if she can

Who has eaten

Her child and her man?

Knock-knock, knock-knock.

Then I remained quiet and Agaat actually started the third verse on her own, rapidly on the in-breath.

Her hunger is great

and her blood is thin

she keeps her heart

on a drawing pin.

Who’s speaking? I ask behind the door.

Me.

Who’s me?

I am me and you are she.

What’s her name?

Agaat.

Agaat who?

Agaat Lourier.

Who is she?

Crawled out of the flea-blanket!

Where does she come from?

Oupa rode a pig!

18 March 1954

Back room door open on a chink. We sit on either side of it on the floor. We sing, we talk, rhymes, songs. Not real sentences yet, but better than nothing. She’s evidently taken in everything, literally every word that I’ve taught her up to now, she can’t be retarded! Everything but. Just Jak that’s nasty. Coon kindergarten, he calls out when he hears us.

20 March 1954

If she doesn’t want to talk to me properly face to face, she doesn’t get food and she stays in her room. That’s the rule. Two days now.

21 March 1954

Back in the corner with the knuckle in the mouth. Ashen-faced, her moles look black. I simply lock her up. She must be taught to obey me. I send Saar to empty the pot. I say at the door what there is to eat. But she must ask properly in a full sentence what I must dish up for her. I’ve run out of patience.

22 March 1954

After three days without food it came at last: ‘May I please have jelly with custard.’

Word for word, said after me, on the in-breath, whispered, eye cast down.

Jelly is for independent people, not parrots, I said. And you look into my eyes when you talk to me, otherwise I don’t hear you.