Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

19 April ’54

We practise facial expressions. I try to develop the mobility of the face beyond just the eyes, around the mouth, in the carriage of the body. Look friendly, look sad, look excited. Look like a full moon, a field mouse, a blossom tree, a dead wall, fresh fire. The ‘dead wall’ she does very well! I play notes on the piano for her and then I press on spots of her face and give a sound value to every spot. She’s my little brown piano I say, I’ll play her full of notes until she sounds like a concert.

21 April ’54

At last! First rhyme on the out-breath, first own independent words! The Lord is my witness, I’m thoroughly exhausted with trying to breathe life into the child. Did then make the promised big bellows-fire here in the back next to the slaughter-bluegum. Assorted woods for the best effect, wattle, bluegum, oily pine cones. A lesson in sound for two. First we lay blowing on either side of the woodpile. As the wood started ticking, snapping, popping, crackling, we imitated sounds, we stoked a blend of sounds, kips, phuit, shffiit, gh-gh-gh-gh, ts-s-s-s-k, ph-ph-ph-ut, b-hub.

Your mouth is a spark, the roof of your mouth is fire, the shaft of the flame is your tongue!

Then we danced the fire! Two flames! Agaat quite inspired. Jumps up and down, whirling the little legs, quaking with the arms. Altogether wild. I blow with the bellows under her dress. You’re the fire! I egg her on. Just had to stop her from coming too close.

Hip-up and Hop-down, I sing to her:

Climb the stairs

Hip-up falls down

And hip-down goes up

What is it?

And there it came at last, after more than three months’ trouble: A fire and its ashes and smoke! she yells and swings her arms, of her own accord she yells it, with a breath coming straight out! She grabs the bellows, all you can see are sparks flying, so hard does she work it, she presses the lower handle against her body with the weak hand and pumps it with the strong.

We extinguished it with a pail of water. She wanted to catch the white, hot, hissing whirls of steam with her hands.

Let them be, I said, they turn into clouds that bring rain again.

Clouds can’t burn, she says. She blows the bellows under them. Phirrrt, phorrrt, up in the air.

Burn, cloud, burn! she calls.

My ears were ringing with it. My blood felt too much for my veins. Now she’d made the bellows her own, I said, to keep for ever as a souvenir of how she came to talk in the world.

I hope she can calm down, perhaps just a little bit of valerian tonight at bed-time.

14 May ’54

Agaat is starting to grow. I weigh and measure her regularly. She’s catching up nicely now. Had her at the doctor’s again, easier this time, he says she’s perfectly normal except for the mechanical defect of the little arm. I make her stand against the door frame of the back room and make pencil marks every month. I write her weight on the calendar in her room. She eats everything and I no longer have to keep track of it, only spinach she refuses flatly. I poo green, she says.

24 May 1954

I now always use fire for special lessons. She learns faster like that. It binds her attention. Reacts more spontaneously. More open to me. In the evening in front of the fire in the sitting room I read from my old Children’s Bible everything from front to back. Then she has to tell it back to me. The blood on the door frames, the red sea, the column of fire in the desert. We’ve now almost reached the gospels. In good full sentences and nice and straight of back, shoulders nicely pulled back, her hands clasped in front of her she has to repeat the stories. Sometimes she clams shut, then I make her pump the bellows and talk along with the bellows, then it goes better again. She now sleeps with the bellows in her bed. When she opens her eyes in the morning, she starts pumping the book.

What time could it be? Why is everything so quiet? When is Agaat coming?

I wish I could have one last bath.

How distant they seem, the days when I could make my way to the bathroom on my own with my walking sticks.

Agaat has abandoned the great ablutions. She still appears with a tub full of steaming hot water, but it’s only a gesture.

I hear six strokes. Is it evening? Or morning?

She’ll be here any moment now with her fragrant waters. She’ll dip the cloth in it. She’ll wring it quite dry, she’ll leave it over my face to steam. Then she’ll dip her small hand in the water and dab me with it till my whole body is full of cool wet patches.

Often I wake up only when she’s already doing it. Touching me with water. She gets to every part of me but I’m no longer invaded or besieged.

It feels as if she’s embalming me.

Small baptism she calls it.

She doesn’t say it out loud. I read it in her eyes. She makes sure that I can see, she uncovers my patched eye when she’s working on my body, so that I can see what’s happening, so that I shouldn’t get a fright. She keeps me going with our eye game. One-eye game it is now, because the other one has fallen shut. She sees to it that my mind stays active, all the time I must interpret, she knows when it’s too difficult, then she gives me audible clues.

Listen to the knocking, children, she sings when she auscultates me lightly, more to keep me alive than to get rid of the phlegm, it feels.

Perhaps I may yet get to see Jakkie.

Have we bought him a Christmas present?

I can’t remember.

And what will Agaat think up for me for Christmas? Would she think of asking me? She’ll press her finger on her help list. Tattered, worn it hangs there on the wall. I hope, I fear, I wish. .

I wish I could bath.

Would I get it spelt out still? BA•T•H? Request an immersion?

It’s easier than PR•A•Y.

The caress of hot water, the tingling. How I long for it! In the contracting circle of delight it was a last small treat. The sensation of weightlessness, of being immersed.

I could imagine that I was lying motionless in the bath just as always, before I got sick. With foam or oils or bath salts. Or mustard after a hard day’s work.

Agaat always gave me a full hour for that invalid’s bath, just came and added hot water every now and again. Saw to it that I didn’t slide down, pulled the little rubber mat under me back a bit, put a bathing cap on my head so that my hair shouldn’t get wet.

Usually the bath included a hairwash. I could lie back completely and almost float, with her strong arm under me, and the small mouse-paw with the fused fingers tilting my head back in the water to massage my scalp.

So pleasurable, the floating feeling, with my neck free of the chafing neckbrace.

It made me smile.

I could still smile then.

That’s what it would be like, I thought then of death, a floating away on a lukewarm pond amongst bulrushes.

Once I looked up at her and saw we were thinking the same thought.

Or I thought it was the same.

I wanted to say something about it. I wanted to whisper, it is good. That we think it, that we dream it.

I could produce only a groan.

Don’t fret, Ounooi, Agaat said, don’t be scared, I’m holding you.

Had she misunderstood me?

Not that she always wanted to help me.

She often looked on passively at my struggle to get to the bathroom. It was the last of my exertions. I could exert myself.

Perhaps she thought it was good exercise.

If I wanted to bath at seven o’clock it took me ten minutes to the bathroom with the Viking Strider. With the four-prong stick, six months later, it already took much longer. The walking frame in the end meant half an hour of wrestling. When I started preparing myself and the first stumbling sounded on the floorboards, Agaat started singing Onward Christian soldiers .