Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

The cave wall suppurates.

Pick the umbrella membranes off the wing-spokes with your teeth!

Because she must become other and roast through all the way to the pips and dispose of her whole self and selfishness must become her own master no longer hunger after otherman’s heart or liver no longer thirst after otherchild’s tears full-steam ahead to the whiter of the twin lights beware of the black and red roofs of damnation thus is it written in the Book of Death. Where did I read it?

I get between her teeth. My body, my blood. She traces the four quarters of the wind on her bib, with her fork she sounds a gong of crystal.

She gets up from the table.

Look, it is finished, she says. She unfolds it. She holds the big cloth before me. The one at which she’s been labouring all this time.

It will just have to be finished now, she says, I can’t do more than this. But before I wash and starch it, I must first put it on and go and lie in your grave with it. This very night is the trial.

My ear that can’t hear, what was that?

She holds the smock above her head like a tent. Over the white apron and over the black sleeves drapes the densely embroidered cloth. Her cap goes under, her cap comes up through the neck-hole.

Oh where did you get that frock, where did you get that shroud?

I spy with my single eye, I spy.

I spy on the frock the sea at Infanta, I spy the land at Skeiding.

In laidwork and blackwork and braiding and cross-stitch and canvas.

It’s the fire, it’s the flood, it’s the feast.

The shearing, the calving, the way of the women, a heron against the sky, a blue emperor in the forest, everything from here to the Hottentots Holland, all the scenes of Grootmoedersdrift.

They swirl before me, they twirl before me, the last merry-go-round. Ritornello.

And here my herald, who tries it on for me and displays it. The fourth dress of woman.

Out onto the gangplank she strides. The ship lies ready, the whistles blow.

Oh, my old piano, I don’t know her, her face a sorrowing ruin.

Is it good enough to be buried in? she asks with her eyes.

With her mouth she says: It’s the best I could do. Do you remember the cloth? The Glenshee linen? For one day when I’m a master, you said. First the history of South Africa you said, and then heaven.

She tightens the drawstrings around her neck.

She smiles a substitute smile. Oh, my most macabre Agaat! I see it in her eyes, only I can see it, I who fattened those eyes! The eye of the master, to the brink of the grave!

Breastwork against the worms, says Agaat’s gaze. Joke! And the hem I’ll sew shut once you’re in, then they can’t get in at the bottom either, at any rate not while your hair is growing that last little bit!

But for the time being the nether regions must remain unstitched.

For the scout goes by foot.

Two black noses of school shoes peer out. Steam rises from the cap. Diabolus in musica! She genuflects, she departs for that white-walled place. Tchi, thci, tchi, go her soles on the track.

The beginning of the end. That’s what you felt all the time during that last feast, that last visit of Jakkie’s. The end that is always a repetition of the beginning. A charging-around in vehicles, a sightseeing tour, a dead sheep, a live sheep, a remembered sheep, a shepherd with staff, birds’ eggs in a bowl, an aeroplane, a fire, the blue birthday-mountains, the white arum lilies in the vlei, the mother, the father, the son, the dishes overflowing, the people, the coming and the going.

And Agaat.

This time it was Jakkie who tried to get at her.

You felt the eyes of the guest scrutinising him, scrutinising the commissions and omissions of all of you.

The food nauseated you.

You felt as if you were floating above the ground all the time. Your tongue felt too big for your mouth, your jaw was numb. You tried to pronounce the proper phrases as well as possible.

Such a run-up, such momentum, so much hope, so much effort, such a wager. To catch the butterfly. And then when it’s in your hand, it’s a fluttering against your palm, the gold dust disperses on your thumb, the rainbow fades, the antennae falter against your wrist.

Paradise is lost when its boundaries come into sight.

Compose your face, Jak said, don’t be such a drama queen.

But his own face was white. And Jakkie was pale under his threedays’ stubble.

It was the first time that he’d arrived home unshaven, in a wrinkled shirt, in a borrowed car full of mud splashes. His own was broken-down in the garage in Saldanha, he said.

You were used to his arriving as if out of a bandbox. To impress all of you, you used to think.

He always brought his case full of blue and white shirts and pants and caps and tunics. For Agaat’s sake, you thought, so that she could marvel at the epaulettes and the buttons and the military-style turn-ups of the trouser legs and the sleeves, so that she could revel in the neat piles of ironing that she created out of them, every pleat ironed to a knife’s edge, all spots and stains soaked out and bleached, the buttons and pins and stripes and belts buffed to a new gloss.

That weekend he had a suitcase with him that you didn’t know, full of ordinary clothes that seemed too big for him.

Never mind, he said to Agaat when she wanted to take it, it’s all clean. And many happy returns again for the birthday that’s passed, I have something for you, but I must wrap it first. And then he asked to be excused, he had to make a quick phone call about something or other, and he took out his diary to look up a number.

Was that when you remembered?

You fetched a sheet of gift-wrap from the cupboard in the passage and slid it under his door while he was changing. You thought: I’ll say nothing, later when Jakkie has left, I’ll tell her I’m sorry.

Did you ever? Was there time to worry about Agaat’s forgotten birthday after everything that followed on Jakkie’s visit?

You looked at them leaving, Jakkie dour, introverted, Agaat with the basket of biscuits and the flask of coffee that you’d packed as of old for their walking-tour of the farm. You went to inspect his room that she’d prepared for him.

There were flowers on the table as Jakkie liked it, as Agaat had taught him to like it, as you’d taught Agaat. Reeds and grasses and foliage and yellow seedheads of fennel squashed in amongst arum lilies. On his night-table there was a midnight-blue earthenware bowl with birds’ eggs, from the collection they’d built up when Jakkie was a lad. You couldn’t think how Agaat had kept the eggs unbroken all those years. But there they were, whole and sound, a brown-flecked plover’s egg, three white dove’s eggs, blue finch eggs, the stonechat’s green egg with russet specks around the big end. And the great prize, two salmon-coloured eggs, marbled with dark-pink and purple. The nightjar’s eggs. The one squatting in the dirt road calling: Oh-lord-oh-lord-deliver-us.

At the foot of the bed was the brown foot-rug that Agaat had knitted and that Jakkie had grown up with. His pillows were covered in pillow slips on which she’d long ago embroidered white on white, The Good Shepherd, The Wise Virgin. As a child he’d always wanted everything in his room to be the same as in hers.

You went and sat on the bed, stroked your hands over the pillows, over the foot-rug to feel the textures. You remembered, Jakkie’s warm little body as you handed him to each other, wrapped in Agaat’s foot-rug when he went to sleep in front of the fire with her in the outside room. You remembered how you’d laid him down on his pillows that Agaat had embroidered for him so that he shouldn’t miss her too much at night, Jakkie’s little fingers as he felt over the pillows, over the rounded backs of sheep, over the shepherd’s staff, beside the flame of the replenished lamp.