Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

I try to think of something else. My bladder is full. I want to. I didn’t want to in the nappy, else there would have been all manner of commentary. And I don’t want to make extra problems, I don’t want to distract her.

Pee and tea is not the problem. Agaat is the problem. She acts stupid. It’s been five days now that I’ve been gesturing there is something, there in the front of the house, in the sideboard, in the front room, with the photo albums.

She doesn’t like the idea that I want to take leave. Perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone. Perhaps telepathy works better through piss in the pan than transmitted in waves through the air into the rock-hard skull of Agaat.

Streams of grace abounding, Agaat sings, flow from God above, sacred source of freshness, that was pledged by His love.

I think of the water map. I think of the underground water-chambers in the mountain, of the veins branching from them, of the springs in the kloofs, of the fountains of Grootmoedersdrift, the waterfalls in the crevices. I think of the drift when it’s in flood, the foaming mass of water, the drift in the rain, when the drops drip silver ringlets on the dark water. And just after it’s cleared, when the black-wattle branches sag heavy and sodden over the ditch and the frogs clamour in the drenched grass-thickets on the bank. Memories in me and I awash between heaven and earth. What is fixed and where? What real? If only I could once again see the places marked on the map, the red brackets denoting gates, cattle-grids, sluices, the red is-equal-to sign of the bridge over the drift, first and last gateway over which the livestock of Grootmoedersdrift move and will continue moving when I am gone. Sheep, cattle, cars, lorries, wire cars, mud and time. Slippery, supple, subtle, silvery time.

Maps attend lifetimes. What is an age without maps? I see it, chambers full of idle melancholy cartographers in the timeless hereafter. Hills there surely will have to be in heaven, but eternal, Eternal Humpbacked Hills, and Eternal Fairweather. Idle melancholy meteorologists. What is a real human being? A run-off. A chute of minutes for God the sluicer. He who paves his guttering with people.

Perhaps I’ve been infected by Agaat. She’s blasphemed for a long time.

It’s coming. Here it comes, through my blessed piss-sphincter, first passing of the day.

Good girl, says Agaat. You don’t perhaps want the number two pan as well, seeing that you’re in the swing of things now? Lesson six, remember? You don’t want dung and piss all over everything if you can help it.

Quite right, I flicker, but I’m not a slaughter animal.

She flickers back.

Otherwise we’ll have no choice but to dose you with a Pink Lady again, she says, a Pink Lady for the lady of Gdrift, it’s five days now that her guts have been stuck. Perhaps that’s what’s making her so restless. What goes in must come out, after all, good heavens!

Take away the pan, I gesture.

No, you first drip-dry nicely now. Then we fix up your uppers first.

It’s a quarter-body wash this morning. Half-wash is every second day and full wash every fourth day. A lick and a promise, Agaat calls the quarter-wash.

She wipes my neck and face with a lukewarm cloth. Then my chest. She works in the cloth under my hospital gown, over my shoulders. She brushes my hair with a dry shampoo. She supports my head with the little hand, so that it doesn’t loll or roll. She rubs cream on my face and ointment in the corners of my mouth. Now the neckbrace. Krrts, karrrts, she rips loose and refastens the Velcro until it’s seated properly. It expands all the time. My neck feels loose.

She brings the hand mirror closer. I close my eyes. Take away your mirror. We haven’t looked in the mirror for a long time. I recognise the mood. She wants to torment me. She’s quite capable of digging up the lipstick and mascara from somewhere again.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, says Agaat, who’s the fairest of them all?

I keep my eyes shut. My face flushes hot with defying her. I refuse to look, I wait until she moves away. I hear her adding water to the washbasin. She pulls out the pan from under me. I hear her walk away with it. I peep from the corner of my eye to see what she’s doing. She puts on her glasses, examines the contents in front of the window. She puts it down on the trestle table, covers it with a cloth. She writes on the calendar with the pencil suspended there on a string, Leroux’s urine record that he wants to see every time he visits me. My logbook. The motions of my entrances and my exits. Today Agaat looks into the pan again and again as if it contained a message. She takes her magnifying glass out of the dressing table drawer. She peers through it and she writes and she looks again. Augur of my elements, who will prevent her from prognosticating my piss? Perhaps it contains tadpoles.

Quite satisfactory under the circumstances, says Agaat, a slight little cloudiness, but nothing to fret about.

She pages the calendar back, taps on it once before she replaces it in the hole for November. She replaces the magnifying glass in the drawer. Ting, go the dressing table’s swing-handles as she slams shut the drawer with her thigh. She knows I’m peeping at her.

She throws off my covers. She wrings out the washcloth, gives me one quick wipe between the legs. It’s too hot. She knows very well it’s too hot.

I keep my eyes shut.

Pees like a mare, says Agaat, nothing wrong with the pee.

I wait for her to cover me again, I’m cold.

She waits for me to take the bait.

A pretty light yellow. Clear except for the little trail. And not at all over-sharp on the nose, she says, just about perfect pee.

What can I reply to that? What acrobatics of eyelids to convey: Your sarcasm is wasted on me. If I could die to deliver you, I would do so, today. Go and find somebody else to pee perfection for you on command. You’re the one who wants to be perfect. You want me to be perfect. We must not be lacking in any respect. If you can do without, I must be able to do without, that’s what you think.

A perfect nurse. A perfect patient.

As I taught you.

According to the book.

What more can anybody expect? you think. And what sticks in your gullet is my surplus neediness, and that you no longer know who I am, and that I’ve changed, that I’m still, every day that I lie here, changing. And that I require something specific from you.

I open my eyes. She’s standing next to my bed with one hand folded into the other.

Everything’s fine, Agaat, I signal, don’t get so het up about nothing, I’m as contented as a little snail in a salad.

But that’s too easy. She’s not looking for an easy victory. She wants to see me angry. She wants to see insurrection. She wants to see what insurrection looks like in the spine of a paraplegic. In my chest I feel a sigh. I have too little breath to sigh. A groan escapes me. I feel tears. I hold them back, but it’s too late, she’s already caught me at it.

Time for your exercises, she says, the chin jutting out. Nothing like movement to lift the spirits, she says, and to get those old guts of yours going.

Your arse, I signal.

Seize the day, says Agaat. She opens the curtains, light streams into the room.

The bedclothes are all pulled off the bed, yanked out at the foot-end, the mattress quakes under me, the bedsocks are stripped off my feet.

No, I gesture, please not now, I’m tired. I close my eyes again, slowly. Last defence, play dead, play at aestivation. Wild pea.

Tired, what’s with tired! Doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders! says Agaat.

Cunt.

Hey! says Agaat, such language! Come now, pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake.

She bends over me and picks my arms up by the wrists and moves my hands in a slow applauding motion.