Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says.

Leroux stands aside. He shakes his head.

Agaat’s face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don’t stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you’re a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out.

A small flicker ripples across Agaat’s face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable.

She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she’s feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now.

I close my eyes. He must think she’s crazy.

Again the fingers snapping in front of my face.

She’s conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she’s just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything’s in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways.

Agaat, I don’t know about that, aren’t you imagining things? How can you know it all with such certainty? You can’t get into the ounooi’s head, no matter how much you want to. You know this kind of illness that locks people up like this in themselves, they get a bit dement. . senile from it. It’s the loneliness, it’s the isolation. You can’t trust that you’re reading them correctly. It’s better to attune yourself to literal meanings, to their essential needs, without subtle intentions, without complicated messages. Otherwise you confuse them, or put all sorts of unnecessary stories in their heads. And as it is they have a hard enough time of it. Don’t you want me to stay over tonight? Do you think. .?

No thank you doctor, I’m not imagining anything, I know her, she’s far from senile. Perfectly sound of mind still.

Agaat looks at me.

I signal to Agaat yes, and you’re also quite sound of mind. Tell the man our imagination is a shared one, tell him we thought each other up and he’s early, it’s not my time yet, tell him a lot of water must pass under the bridge here, tell him I want only you here. And he must stop snapping his fingers in my face as if I’m a poodle. That I find a wee bit too literal, thank you.

Agaat widens her eyes. Ho now! it means, behave yourself. But glad to see you’ve still got some kick left nevertheless.

Leroux steams ahead. It would be no problem at all, I brought an overnight bag, I can sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. .

Perhaps the language of women is impenetrable to men anyway. Even when the women can say everything out loud. Or perhaps it’s the language of the nurse and the patient of which the highly-educated physician has no inkling.

It’s not her time yet, doctor, Agaat parries, I’ll know, she’ll let me know.

As you see fit, Agaat, then I might as well go now, just come and collect the other oxygen tank from the car, the extra mask.

I’ll be back in a moment, she signals to me behind the doctor’s back. She makes a sign to show she’s working him out, she’s getting rid of the intruder, him with his little light and his case and his sign language for dogs. He mustn’t come and interfere here. We’re man enough.

Suddenly I feel weak. It’s their backs, first Leroux’s, his back in a grey suit with the double vent at the back and then Agaat’s with the stiff white bow of her apron. For my sake she tried to walk backwards, so as not to leave me alone too abruptly, to reassure me. But now she’s turned around. And here I lie, here I’m left behind. Perhaps we’re not up to it, perhaps he’s right, the doctor, perhaps we are jointly out of our minds to think we can complete this project in the allotted time. All the parts of it. The remembering, the reading, the dying, the song.

She pretended not to see my second thought. Leroux’s footsteps stop in the passage. Agaat walks on.

And all these things lying here? I hear him ask.

Agaat doesn’t reply, she has passed him, she opens the front door for him.

I’m asking, what are all those things piled up there in the passage?

Just some old stuff. She wanted to throw it away a long time ago, when we cleared out the house. Then I didn’t believe it. So I kept it all in the cellar. Now she’s asking to look at it all again, her little things from long ago.

I see, says Leroux. There’s suspicion in his voice.

That’s what I think she wants to see, says Agaat.

Well, you know she must remain calm. She mustn’t upset herself unnecessarily. The slightest thing that makes the breathing irregular, anything that brings too much spit to the mouth, grief, consternation. .

I can just see him, how he bobs with his head. Then she’s had it, he wants to say.

The man is a bit unpolished. I’ve known it for a long time. He’s improper. He does rounds in the zoo, where the creatures are caged in and he has to feed them, give them oxygen, mumble little anodyne platitudes. The only diversions, he thinks, are his visits. An outsider representing the real world and the wisdom of the wise.

I don’t upset her, says Agaat. If she wants to see things, she’ll see them, she still has quite enough of a will of her own. Agaat sounds determined, as if she would sponsor my will of my own to the end of all time.

Leroux’s footsteps resound loudly. Well then, go ahead and bugger up, his tread says, past cure is past care. You complicate the course of events with your little games.

His parting words I half catch.

It’s of no use to anybody, he says, if you drive yourself to the brink. . I can’t hear any more of this. What could he have said? It’s of no use to anybody if you drive yourself to the brink. . of death, of somebody else’s death?. . to the brink of insanity, somebody else’s insanity?

The brink of the abyss. The last frontier. Before the hinterland. Before the Hottentots-Holland. Before the Overberg. No-man’s-land.

No, the man is too obtuse to think up something like that, the wind blows his words back into the sitting room. The front door bumps against the doorstop. They are standing on the stoep. Under the front-door light. Where the geckoes sit with their mouths full of moth. The message is clear. Agaat, will she hold back the door with her little hand, keep it open so that I must hear?

It’s of no use to anybody if you drive yourself to the brink of exhaustion, Agaat. Remember, you’re the only care-giver here. If you also collapse, we have an even bigger crisis on our hands. Do the necessary. Spare yourself, cut out the frills. See to it that you eat regularly, get enough sleep, go for a walk in the veld, in the mountains. You can’t hold her. She’s withering away, every day a little more. You must accept. You must resign yourself. It’s time. Nobody can battle against death.

They’re out on the stoep, down the steps, the boot clicks open, slams shut again. The engine idles. Last instructions, inaudible directions, a car door slams, lights swivel across the yard.

Then Agaat calls the dogs back into the yard, she removes the doorstop, closes the front door. She puts something down on the floor. It sounds like deep-sea diving equipment. She rustles something in the passage.

She comes into the room with a rolled-up length of cloth, tied with bows in three places.

Ai mercy, the doctor, she says, he’s a meddler.

She looks at the wall.

Ounooi, it’s only your breath.

She brings a chair.

You have a lack of breath.

The cloth has a piped seam that is threaded onto a bamboo rod. One of those that we used to train tomatoes. Tomato-rod. There’s a string attached with a loop and a picture hook. She smoothes the seam with one hand, so that the cloth is in the centre of the rod.