Marlene van Niekerk: Agaat

Where, in any case, does something like that begin? Your destiny? Where does it begin?

The ‘dedication’ I thought up much later, when things were going well for a while, just after Jakkie’s birth. Then I inscribed it in the front of the first booklet on the inside of the cover. Date and all, 14 September 1960.

Now she wants to come and force it down my gullet. My unconsidered writing, on an empty stomach in my sickbed, and to come and confront me with my constipation. What’s the sense of that?

As if I can protest.

As if I can eat.

Breakfast.

Can one call it breakfast?

I have no choice but to swallow it.

I heard her talk in the kitchen. Dawid was there and Julies and Saar and Lietja. They were waiting for Agaat to come and issue the order of the day. At eight o’clock sharp they have to fall in. They were talking loudly. Agaat was in a hurry. She wanted to go and silence them. They fall silent when they hear her approach.

I pointed with my eyes, the box, the box.

Just wait a while now, she said, later. She didn’t catch my drift.

Do as I say, I gestured.

Now who’s carrying on agn so ths mrning, she said.

A new thing, the speaking without vowels. Mocking me. Nastier than Jak ever was about the diaries.

She moved the bridge closer over the bed, brought the reading stand and set it up.

Do you want to read your covenant once more? Just can’t get enough of it, can one? Perhaps it will give you an appetite.

That was a good start. She thought I wanted to read myself.

No, I could signal, that’s not what I want to read.

That’s my technique nowadays. Progress through misunderstanding. I just had to get the misunderstandings going first. The first would lead on to another until I had reached my goal. It’s a kind of retarded logic, a breaking down of each of my intentions into the smallest intermediate steps. Gone are the days of the shortest distance between A and B. Now we’re doing the detours, Agaat and I. By rolling my eyes at a pile of reading matter I can see to it that she ends up at the black box. I always have to fix her attention on the surface first. It’s a start. And then I have to get her delving. This morning she obliged me, she put the pile of blue booklets aside and started rummaging through the magazines.

What do you want to read, Ounooi? She paged rapidly though a Sarie .

Four ways of getting your husband on your side and keeping him there.

No.

No, she said, I don’t think so either.

I looked again at the pile on the dressing table.

She took a Farmer’s Weekly and opened it.

New developments in the practice of crop and pasture rotation: The south-western districts after 1994? Nay what, you know all about that. What about: The future of small-grain cultivation in South Africa? That’s just up your alley, Ounooi, the future.

Lietja laughed loudly in the kitchen. There was a jingling of milk cans.

They’re getting out of hand there in the kitchen, I have to go and check, said Agaat.

She clamped the magazine to the reading stand, on top of the torn-out sheet, on top of my symptomatic-treatment list, set it up more upright so that I could see, put my glasses on for me.

The future. She placed her finger under the words.

No, I signalled with my eyes, no, no, don’t come with your silly games now.

Again she turned to the pile and went through the magazines.

Now where are all the Fair Lady s then, they were here?

She started to unpack the whole pile, fixing my eyes in the mirror.

Ounooi, you’re making me late now. I don’t see the Fair Lady s, wait, there’s one here. Fine Foods for Fine Occasions.

It was the last magazine down. I forced her eyes down, still further down. There was the shiny black box now, open to the eye. She couldn’t follow my glance in the mirror, had to turn round to see better where I was looking.

Tsk, she said and shook her head, no.

Yes, I said with my eyes.

She took out the contraption. It was still assembled just as she’d packed it away. She straightened my fingers and fitted it over my hand. It wasn’t necessary to unfasten the buckles. All the brown leather bands were tightened to the first hole and the chrome wing nut was screwed in as far as it could go. A long piece of wire stuck up above the head of the nut like an antenna. The thing looks like a glove for handling radioactive waste. Long since been too big for me. Long since too heavy. Like all Leroux’s gadgets that he comes peddling here, it works for a while and then no longer.

I looked at my hand. I braced myself. I gestured, pen please. And paper. I can’t write on air.

Agaat looked about her.

Now she knew what I wanted to do but she pretended she’d forgotten where to find writing materials. It’s been a long time since I wrote myself. When I made the lists, when we cleared the house, a year, year-and-a-half ago. Eventually I dictated and she wrote. Or she wrote, and with my last strength I ticked off what had to be thrown away. The blue booklets. I said throw out. She read the instruction and ignored me.

Now she’s acting stupid. As if she doesn’t regularly get out the clipboard to press on when making her latest lists, take out her red pen from the top pocket of her apron. And there’s the pencil, hanging from its string next to the calendar. She’s always making notes. Writes them up everywhere. What do you want the people to eat at your funeral, Ounooi? Stewed tripe? So what do you want me to have inscribed on your headstone, Ounooi? And then God saw that it was good ?

Yes or no I can signal. Or I can close my eyes.

She hauled out the clipboard from the lowest half-empty rack of the bookshelf.

Tsk.

The books fell over. She had to go on her knees to set them upright again. Shiny jackets and old canvas covers. Some of them were still my mother’s. I threw out most of them in my great clearing-out. Agaat kept them. As she kept the diaries. She recited the titles as she put them back. With a straight voice, the whole list. Late Harvest, The Mayor of Colesberg, Carnival of the Carnivores, Seven Days at the Silbersteins . That was nothing. Forty-three Years with the De Wets, Floodwaters in the Fall, On Veld and Ridge, Chronicle of Crow’s Crag, Circles in a Forest, Straight Tracks in the Semi-desert, Turn-off, July’s People, As I Lay Dying, The Downhill of the Day is Chill, She Who Writes Waits, The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, Breeders Don’t Faint , tsk, try The Midwife of Tradouw, This Life That Death, Miss Sophie Flees Forward, The Portrait of a Lady, The Story of an African Farm , hmf, rather then In the Heart of the Country . That’s what she read last, recently. Nay what, she said, she could farm up a piece of land better than the wretched old Johanna who lost her marbles for no reason at all, and she wouldn’t let a bunch of forward kaffirs get her down. That was before she read The Seed is Mine which the woman from the library brought along last time. That shut her up. I know what was in her head. Fennel seed.

Like old acquaintances all the titles sounded as she put them back, like the names of family. She read them all to me in the last few months, or turned the pages on my stand so that I could read for myself. She’d read all the old ones herself long ago and first sampled all the new ones before reading them to me. She knew whole sections by heart. She said not one of them was as good a read as my diary, all you had to do was fill in the punctuation and write everything out in full, then you had a best-seller.

And then on top of that there are all Jakkie’s books and magazines, sent on over the years, in which there are chapters and articles written by him. Agaat reads aloud from them regularly, very taken with her own importance, struggling over the long English words, but I’ve never really understood much of it. Private Speech, Public Pain: The Power of Women’s Laments in Ancient Greek Poetry and Tragedy, Mourning Songs of the Dirty Goddesses: Traces of the Lamia in Orthodox Baptismal Rites of the Levant, Echoes of the Troll Calls in Romantic Scandinavian Choir Music . Terribly obscure, all of it. Another one about the polyphonic wailings of Australian aboriginal women when somebody dies off. The stuff he finds to waste his time with, the child, after all, he has a perfectly good engineering qualification in aeronautics. Chucked into the ocean. For ethnomusicology, whatever that may be.