Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

I mustn’t stare, I must let her be.

Agaat’s talking shoulder.

I wait, I look in the mirror. The green of scraps of tree, the varied greens of the ornamental cypresses and the water-berry and the honey-bread tree, red flecks in between from the weeping bottlebrush that has sprouted again after she had it pruned at the end of winter. A shiny shard of the roof of the shed, a haze of hills further along, everything framed by the dark purple of the bougainvillea clambering over the trellis on the stoep. And in one corner, one could easily miss it, Agaat’s profile. She doesn’t know I can see her front, from the side only, but enough to read it. There’s a frown on her face, as if she cannot comprehend the bougainvillea, as if she’s trying to fathom the bread.

Like Christmas, it’s flowering, says Agaat again.

She lifts her hands, pat-pats at her cap.

Right out of the tin. .

I make room, I give her a chance. I look at the reflection in the mirror, look with Agaat who doesn’t know that I’m looking with her. She will see the whole garden, framed in the purple. For me it’s carved up and jumbled together in fragments in the three panels, bits of the flowerbeds. The central panel is brighter than the other two. The one that broke long ago. For eleven months now the mirror has been standing in the same position with its panels at the same angle. I know the content of the reflections, I try to imagine the bits left out, the avenues of agapanthus that must by now be in full bloom, the borders of gillyflowers and wild pinks and snapdragons and purple and white petunias that Agaat sowed and had planted in the late spring, in the early summer, so that I might still experience it, and the people who will come for my funeral.

She came in September and held in front of me the packets of summer bulbs and seeds.

Choose, she said, I’ve bought ten packets of everything and ordered 500 bulbs from Starke Ayres.

Everything, sow everything, I gestured, sow everything, it’s my last garden.

There I was right, I could see, she wanted to sow everything, her eyes shone. She blinked quickly and turned round and for three days on end sowed seeds and planted bulbs and walked singing and whistling round the house so that I could hear where she was working, and at mealtimes came and told me three beds of white gladiolus at the back and purple dahlias in the middle and right in front purple and white sweet alison. And in-between fennel for fragrance and for the fine feathers of foliage and for the yellow flower-heads that will mitigate the strictness of dahlias and gladioli and break the purple and white.

Tobacco flower, Californian poppies, and common poppies, and Queen Anne’s lace for delicacy, and in the dry beds sunflowers and zinnias and painted ladies high and low. Would she not have drawn a plan? Would she have done it free-hand this time? Somewhat more carelessly, extravagantly, more higgledy-piggledy than usual? For the music? For the departed?

There must be a show garden in flower out there.

A bower of beauty.

She’s watered it every day. From early every morning I can hear the sprinklers go tchip-tchip-tirrr over the lawns. Until the sun heats up at nine o’clock and then again in the evenings when the plants have regained their composure after the scorching of the day.

Agaat knows how to make a garden grow.

This evening if there’s no wind, if I’m lucky, if her mood continues to soften, she’ll open the stoep doors. For me to smell everything that’s in bloom. Perhaps by following her movements, by concentrating on her intentions, I’ll have my way. Perhaps I’ll manage to usurp her will on the sly, and keep it warm in me, without her even noticing that I have it, meld it with mine so that we can have one will for these last days.

Smell the world! Take the scent, all along the flowerbeds and further along the boundary fences! Show me the outlines! Fetch the maps from the sideboard!

She catches my gaze in the mirror, catches me out in a calculation, in a fantasy. I see the indignation leap in her face, her eyes narrowing. I should have kept my eyes shut. When she turns round her mien is neutral, but the battle continues, I can hear it in her heels.

I didn’t mean it like that! Please!

She adjusts the bed so that I sit up straight, she fits the neckbrace. Her hands are cold and swift. She puts the tray down hard on the bridge.

I blink my eyes to say: You’re too touchy! One can’t do anything without your taking offence! I don’t want to eat! I’m not ready for your fragrant favours!

She ignores me. I blink my eyes.

I say again: I don’t want to! I’m not ready!

She pretends not to see. She puts the bib on my chest, she pulls and plucks at it. She bends her head.

Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts, she prays.

She scoops the first teaspoon half-full of pumpkin.

Now she’ll watch my breathing, bring the spoon into my mouth, tilt it towards the back where she can get hold of my swallowing reflex. I look at her, I look at the spoon, I look at the mirror.

For what are you looking like that, Ounooi?

Ounooi. For the sake of bread and bougainvillea!

She looks where I’m looking in the mirror, its edges brimming with bougainvillea, suspended in a tree-lined landscape. There’s a flash.

Birds, tiny birds, white-eyes that fly away from the fig tree I can’t see, that grows just around the corner. That I, Lord, can’t see. The early figs at the top ripe bells. The first light-green figs on a plate arranged with a flare of purple bougainvillea, that was how I served them, for the season, to mark it, to celebrate it, midsummer on Grootmoedersdrift. My figs.

Hmm, says Agaat, we must see if there are any figs yet, the tree around the corner here is dragging its branches on the ground this year.

She suspects something, she swivels her neck, she keeps on looking with me in the mirror. Determined to twist my arm to eat. The windmill must turn, the thresher must churn. The pumpkin must in.

And the bougainvillea, it’s flowering as if it’s never going to stop.

Is she taunting me? Does she think I must take my cue from it, from the flowers, from the wheat, from the bread?

I have ears to hear, I flicker, how many more times are you going to say it today? Since when do you expect me to compete with bougainvilleas? But she doesn’t look at me.

She keeps on looking away at the stoep door. I see her neck, the neck of Agaat from the side with the constellation of dark moles, and the row of hairpins securing the white cap.

Slowly she turns her head back, careful on her perch to get the best from the moment, focused on putting me in a place where I’ll submit and blink my eyes to say, yes I will eat, you may approach with your teaspoon, Agaat, depress it slowly on the tip of my tongue and slide it firmly upwards all along the middle to halfway, so that I have less work to do, and I will swallow what you have prepared for me. So nourish also our souls.

But I don’t do it. The fragments of green in the mirror are a reproduction, a repetition of another plan, in another format. As a map is of a place. If I can get her to grasp the analogy. Mirror, map, reproduction, repetition.

I press my gaze against the front of Agaat’s white cap. As if it’s a sail and my will a wind.

I look past her at the mirror and then quickly at the wall next to my bed. At the mirror, at the wall. From the fragmented garden to the off-white surface of the wall. From what is lacking in the reflected summer to what is lacking on the despoiled wall, an image, a hill farm on a flat plan, suspended by its loop from the picture rail. To and fro I look, to and fro, with the white-eyes that flash in the mirror, around the invisible corner, to the invisible fig tree. Agaat, don’t you see then, the unseeable, this goodly frame the earth, don’t you see it, quartered by the compass, east west south north! The yard, the dam, the mountain, the drift!