Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Agaat strokes from my forehead, backwards over my hair. Backwards. Once. Once more.

My whole scalp erupts in one blaze, from the front, worse than ever.

I close my eyes, open them quickly, I to-and-fro them, turned up in their sockets.

Scratch my head! Scratch my head! My goddamned, scabby skull! Scratch it!

I see the light come on in Agaat’s eyes. I see the smile. She wants to suppress it but she can’t.

Stutterers, deaf-mutes, idiots, cripples, the lame, the itchers? Why does one want to laugh at them? I don’t know, Agaat. And bugger you too, Agaat!

She postpones. Her eyebrows deliberate question marks. Then she scrabbles a quick scratching motion with her fingers, just a little one, an appetiser. She doesn’t speak, she only shapes the word ‘itch’ with her mouth.

Silent movie. The Itcher and the Scratcher. How many acts tonight?

Need a scratch? ask her lips.

I close my eyes. It means you are an angel of deliverance. It means surrender. She must not remark any further urgency on my part.

The head, asks Agaat, and where else?

She puts her hand under my shoulder.

Here?

Tiny scorpions under a stone.

She pulls out the hand again, rests it on the point of my shoulder.

Three nymphae of the blue tick, their mandibles firmly affixed to my skin.

She puts her hand in the hollow between my breasts.

Small scaly adders in a nest.

Now she touches me with both hands. Lightly, here and there over my strings, over my stops, over my keys. Over my ribs, my belly, my thighs, my ankles, my toes. As if I were a harp. A harp of grass, of chaff and sand fleas and whirling itchy dust.

Everywhere? Is it everywhere?

She puts her hands in her sides. Looks me up and down.

An itch-storm? Ai me. Tsk.

Here comes a hand. It comes towards my head. It scratches, but in an unfocused way.

Harder?

Harder! Everywhere!

Now before we damage something here, Ounooi, let me first see whether you don’t have a rash or something.

Agaat opens the curtains. She tarries by the window. How would I know if it’s deliberate? Or resigned? Or tired? Or not capable of imagining for one moment longer my need? The spring unsprung at last? She spies on my eyes every day. My need her reins. The steerer and the steered and the bit. In whose mouth is it? It must be like sleeping in someone else’s dream. Your own journey abandoned, your own repose an iron in the mouth. You just bite on it. You bite it fast. How she must curse me at times. Cunt. Bugger. But the word in the mouth, a stopper. Under the white standard of the cap a mouth full of bitter teeth.

Where she’s standing in front of the window Agaat’s strong hand creeps over her shoulder. Just above the white apron band on the right, on the thick flesh of the shoulder blade she scratches herself.

She sighs.

The Great Itch, she says, you and I, each other’s itch.

I keep my eyes shut. Is she going to start scratching her own head to provoke me? Is she going to try and talk me out of it? Is she going to ignore it? How beneficent is her mood? Will she ever start a sentence with ‘I feel’ or ‘I wish’ or ‘I hope’? Is it her itch that is erupting on me? Because she can’t speak?

She switches on the lamp next to the bed. She unbuttons the bed-jacket. She eases it down over my abdomen. She takes out the reading glasses from the breast pocket of her apron. Onto her nose she presses them. Shirrt-shurrt she pulls on the latex gloves.

Let’s see what’s happening here, she says, nobody can just itch like that for no reason.

She looks on both sides of my neck, on my chest. Her eyes are large behind the lenses. She reads my grain. My knots and my flaws. Between the lines.

Excuse me, but I have to inspect all around here a bit now, she says. She avoids my eyes. She takes the magnifying glass out of the dressing table drawer.

She lifts my breasts. She looks under them. She looks in the wrinkles of the skin of my belly. She pulls open my navel and shines the head of the bedside lamp into it. I feel the hook-and-claw feet of a beetle scrabbling in there. Can one go mad from itching? The rose beetle has twenty-five legs and seven antennae.

Permission? Agaat asks with her eyes?

Granted!

The itch blazes on me like a coat of many colours.

She pulls the tunic off my lower body. She scrutinises my loins through her lenses. She folds open my labia.

From where I’m lying, I see her mouth move through the magnifying glass, a vague fleshy hole.

Pure as morning dew, she says.

She comes slightly upright over my lower body, blows on the magnifying glass, polishes it with the tip of her apron.

Impossible are your texts, Agaat. How are you going to explicate me one day? How are you going to explain everything to yourself? Collarbone, knuckle bone, jaw? Will you have a motto for every part of me? Perhaps that’s what you’re practising for? Perhaps you are now already calling me up. Poltergeist. But ghosts don’t itch. That’s all that still stands in your way. This last proof of external sensation.

Now she’s inspecting my thighs, inside and out, the birthmark in the bend of my knee, the shadows under my knees. Under her magnifying glass the itch fumes a salty mist, like drifts of sand across a dune, my shins, my ankles, two rusty wrecks.

She stacks her towel rolls on either side of me, she tilts me on my side, each touch produces a fresh flush of itchy patches. She is behind me, she examines the rough ridges, the giant sungazer lizard with its spiny girdle sun-gazing on the Trappieshoogte, the aloes, the bitter juice, the rustling mirage.

She tilts me back.

I don’t see anything. No redness, no dandruff, no rash, no scaliness, no bumps, no pimples. Not a bedbug in sight, mite-free definitely. Now tell me, are you still itching?

Agaat, I’m talking to you, look at me, the stars are old. Shall I give you a stone when you ask for bread? Just scratch me a bit for the sake of all the gods!

Very well, but just gently, I think you’re imagining things. That’s what I think she wants to say, because now her lips have stopped moving.

She goes and puts the magnifying glass back in the drawer, takes off her glasses and replaces them in the top pocket. Shirrrt-shurrrt, she pulls off the gloves. She washes her hands in the washbasin. I smell disinfectant. She dries them. She inspects her nails.

Her eyes look slightly unsure. What proof does she have that I’m not losing my mind? Her mouth is unfathomable.

She pulls the sheet back over my body. She wants to spare me that, spare herself that, the sight of her hands, the big one and the small, scratch-scratching over my naked emaciated body. Perhaps she wants to prevent herself from starting to laugh. Perhaps she wants to prevent herself from starting to tickle me. Perhaps she will all of a sudden want to tickle me. If I can itch I’m still ticklish. Perhaps she’s feeling a bit hysterical. Perhaps it hasn’t ebbed away yet after the great joke with the neighbour’s wife.

I inspect the stirrings under the sheet. I cast the harness of my eyes over the ill-matched pair. The fingers are cautious. She follows the movements of my eyes on her hands. My eyes are her score. She does sight-reading. She plays the keyboard. By touch. Trills. Scales. A chord. The note-perfect rehearsed death I shall be, the virtuoso performed.

Left, right, no, a bit to the top, more, no down more, down, this side, no that side. There! Just there! More! Don’t stop. Now up here. No, just next to it. Up! Down!

The clock strikes in the passage. That was a quarter of an hour’s scratching. From head to toe and in all the little crannies, in front, behind and along the sides. A partita. Improper tempo. Fantastic execution. Complete relief. Applause! Flowers!