Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Ten past two

Went to switch off all the lights again wouldn’t want her to think I’m eaten up with worry!

Half past two

Now did you ever! A. is on the mountain in her new uniform! I was standing on the stoep just now first I thought I heard singing then I thought I saw something white stirring on the little foothill thought at first it was the guano bags I tied there to show where the wattles must be hacked out then it turned out it was A. all the time. Could make hr out clearly with J.’s binoculars. Can’t see what she’s getting up to there odd steps & gestures against the slope.

Nine o’clock morning 13 July

Lay awake all night & couldn’t get warm again after all the roaming around outside then I heard six o’clock a stirring in the kitchen I thought now I’m pretending not to have an inkling & next thing she comes down the passage tchi-tchi in her new soles not a crinkly curl in sight neatly dressed in hr uniform cap pinned just right & proper coffee on a tray slight smell of grass & shrubs but beyond that without a trace dogs following her & pushing their snouts into her. Know what that means or perhaps it’s just the uniform that smells of shop.

The running off in the night. Feels as if I could have dreamed it all. What a fright she gave me, heavens! But I don’t let on. Perhaps she’ll tell me one day what exactly she went to do there what in God’s name got into her & what became of the suitcase & hr house clothes the two pretty dresses made for hr & the dirty clothes from the sheep-slaughtering. Not that it would be a great loss if they’re gone was a lot of old stuff anyway & would be too small for her. My red jersey on the hook. Pennant & signal I know hr.

That to-do on the hill I can’t figure out. Sideways & backwards knees bent foot-stamping jumping on one leg jump-jump-jump & point-point with one arm at the ground. Then the arms rigid next to the sides. Then she folded them & then she stretched them. Looked as if she was keeping the one arm in the air with the other arm & waving. Thought at first oh so I’m late I suppose it’s been carrying on for a long time the nocturnal meetings but I didn’t see anybody coming no whistling or calling just the thrumming two three notes over & over.

How strange all the same. Hr head in the air, looking up at hr little arm as if it’s a stick. Walking stick? Fencing-foil? Then again held still in front of hr, palm turned down palm turned up. Judgement? Blessing? Over the hills over the valley along the river? A farewell ritual? Where would she get it from? So weird it all is I can’t put the images out of my head I think of it all the time. Why up there? What could she have wanted to see? Can imagine well what it would have looked like in the moonlight the river between the trees the grazing on the valley-side the moon-grey hills on the south-eastern side & here & there a clearing so that one can see the great plain stretched out behind. Nothing that she hasn’t seen many a time before.

Could the binoculars have been playing tricks upon me? Hr arm a pointer? Pointing-out pointing-to what is what & who is who? An oar? A blade? Hr fist pressing apart the membrane & the meat as if she’s dressing a slaughter animal? But not a sheep, as if she’s separating the divisions of the night. Or dividing something within herself. Root cluster.

Far-fetched, Milla! Your imagination is too fertile for your own good. But surely one couldn’t think it up. A. in hr working clothes in the moonlight in the middle of the night doing a St Vitus’s dance. I could surely not have dreamt that. There must be a simple explanation. Perhaps she’s working herself up to running away. I suppose I’ll get to the truth of the matter one day. Must go & see perhaps the suitcase is back.

A broad sheaf of light spills into the room, light that I know well, the yellow light of late afternoon. Ten to five? It’s somewhere between the quarters, stray time. The alarm clock is hidden behind a box of tissues titled Inspirations.

But something is different. The opening is not in the middle of the swing doors as always aligned with the door knobs, the curtains have been drawn so that the opening is slightly to one side of the glass doors. And the gauze lining hasn’t been drawn as usual, it’s been swept back over the white cord that runs above the door frame, it’s been pushed away behind the curtain. I can make out the garden through the slight distortion of the little old glass panels in the stoep doors.

But it’s not only the gibbous glass. It’s the light itself inside the room that quivers. It’s filled with something, a restorative rippling, pellucid, watery, beckoning.

From where this light? What can lend such a quality to this chamber of death that I know in every last detail? Over which my eyes wander daily, filled as it is with the signs of my end, the nursing-aids that promise no recovery, that are applied to the polite dismantling of my body, to the daily cleansing of my limbs, four, my three axils of armpit and pudendum, the clefts of finger toe and buttock, the crannies behind my ears, the hollow of my navel, the subsidences above my collarbones, my head with its seven holes, the little bottles of pills for the relief of my spit, my tears, for the singing in my ears, for my wasting spasmodic muscles, the instruments for the measurement of my remaining reflexes, for the notation of the statistics of my going hence.

What an ado about nothing every day!

What a farce!

Pastime, Agaat calls it sometimes. Respite. Of late she’s taken to reading me poems from the collections circulated by the South African ALS support group. Who will get them after me? Such recyclable frail-care books, it’s as good as bequeathing your coffin to the next candidate for one day’s lying-in-state.

And now in the midst of so much attrition, the light comes and announces itself in my room like an unfamiliar word. Like a word that you recognise as a word but of which the meaning just evades you. Sculp. Scullogue. Scuggery. Scuffle-hunter. Agaat’s and my dictionary games. What will she play with me now, now that words fall ever more into disuse in this room? Light-and-shadow chess? Trompe l’oeil ?

Now I know what it is! It’s the dressing table!

It’s turned differently, at an angle towards the stoep side. The two side panels have been adjusted. Like the wings of a thing flying forward, and stumbling the last stretch, yearning to catch up with something, to capture.

There’s a view of the garden in the mirror, but sharper, clearer than a garden can be. My garden I see there, cut out on three levels, abounding with detail, the most alluring prospects.

It’s cornflowers I see, deep blue cornflowers in the one wing and in the other wing a cascade of long bent stems of light-blue agapanthus. And crepusculating on the central panel, in a pool of jacaranda shade, the voluptuous powder-blue heads of hydrangeas in full flower.

Cautiously I sip at it, choking with emotion would spell the premature end of this story. Could Agaat have started understanding me, at last! If it wasn’t coincidence, if she could get that far merely on the basis of eye signals, endless possibilities remain ahead, then I mustn’t spoil it now with an attack of sentimentality.

The mirror reveals a perfect result. The best I’ve ever experienced the garden. This is how I had always imagined the north-east side could look. I planned it in terms of all the different shades of blue in the catalogues. This is how I imagined it. Blue perennials, iris, agapanthus, hydrangea, bushes of kingfisher daisies, annuals sowed in the low borders every year, first for the winter plain blue pansies and forget-menots that started coming up by themselves in tract upon tract and then ageratum for spring, and after that for summer, cornflower, cornflower, and again cornflower. Because of blue one can never have enough in the barren yellow and brown of summer and also not in winter when it must help the rains to fall as the old people believed.