Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Dawid didn’t talk back. There was a silence and then the slamming of the screen door.

Is that what’s bringing out her nastiness? The new order?

Snip, Agaat cuts with the sharp-pointed scissors in the air, snip, snip, while she regards me from all sides. She pretends to restrict her gaze to my surface, to the wet strands of hair plastered straight against my scalp, up against the tent around my neck. She pretends that everything about me is purely a matter of layout and systematic attack.

But actually she’s looking for a peephole. She wants to see what I think of her latest installations here in the room. Straight into me she wants to peer, direct, as if there were a silver screen behind my eyelids full of moving images that could provide her with a truer, more intimate version of my reaction. As if I could contain any secrets that she doesn’t know.

She has carried everything she could think of into my room and covered the walls with it.

Only not the maps.

Why should she at this stage want to disregard the maps? From the day that I’ve been lying here and can no longer move around in a wheelchair, I’ve been hearing the door of the sideboard open. Tchick, open, tchick, closed. One of the imbuia pieces from my mother still, just like the dressing table here in the bedroom. With the powerful little magnets and the copper lips on the inside of the catches. Tchick. A seamlessly solid and impenetrable object, with its heavy undulating edge on top and scalloped fringe below. Congealed on ball-and-claw feet. Squatting. Full of dangling little copper handles and festoons. Like an old-fashioned American negress in the National Geographic . With many gold rings, earrings and nose-rings. Hunkering. Tchick, open, and after a while, tchick, closed. Then I knew Agaat had selected herself another blue booklet, to come and deposit here with me for the time being. With an announcement of the title that she had thought up herself, a foretaste of the evening’s reading. Not backward at all in getting good mileage out of it. Now the books from two little parcels are lying here with dog-eared pages and I hear the same old stories ad nauseam. Where are the rest? Surely there was a third parcel?

Other than that there are only the photo albums in the sideboard, the title deeds of the farm, my marriage certificate. What else? In a little suitcase, all Jakkie’s school reports and cuttings of his school concerts. His degree certificates and medals he removed and took away with him when he left that morning in ’85. And then a few pieces of silver and old porcelain from my mother’s house. A little set of Woodstock glasses. The coffee set with the desert scenes. Agaat knows it will be hers one day. Soon. In a few days. And the napkins that she embroidered with white gardenias for my fiftieth birthday meal. Too pretty to use. The golden year. 1976. Cape gardenias while the country was going up in flames. In two years’ time she will be fifty herself. Perhaps she’ll start using them then. With whom would she ever in any case sit down to such an elegant table?

Perhaps with Jakkie if he comes. Perhaps she will herself, of her own accord, set a place for herself at the table with him. Perhaps not, perhaps that’s my dream for her, more probably he will have to make her sit with him, a meal for two when everything is over, before he returns. And she will sit down and pretend to eat.

Would it really be for Jakkie that she now all of a sudden wants to tidy me up? Or does she want to take it out on me that he still hasn’t let her know when he’ll be coming? Or has he? Tomorrow perhaps? Eye-wash! This hair-cutting has nothing to do with anybody else. It’s just she who wants to get at me.

First she washed my hair. She dropped the back railing of the bed, released the brake and rolled it away from the wall. She brought up the small trolley. I could lie back with my head in the washbasin with the neck-support. She massaged my scalp, shampooed with anti-dandruff tar shampoo, rubbed in conditioner, rinsed three times, rubbed dry. Special treatment. An ultra-thorough itch-repellent delivery. Energetic too. Where she gets it from.

It can’t be from absent-mindedness that she doesn’t want to fetch the maps. She will remember them, she had to unpack the whole sideboard that day to fit in the fat roll of maps from Jak’s office in the back. I remember I found her there on her knees in the sitting room surrounded by all the stuff with the blue booklets tied with string on her lap. So what is this then? she asked. As if she wouldn’t have remembered.

Just old stuff, I said. Throw it out, it just takes up space.

I could see she had other ideas. Her jaw betrayed her. But she said nothing.

With the last clearing-out, when I was half paralysed already, the diaries put in another appearance. The string on two of the packets had fallen off. I was sitting in the Redman Chief next to her with the Royal Reacher. I could still pick up or move the odd thing here and there. I manoeuvred the blue booklets aside, the third pile that was still tied up.

Onto the bonfire with that, I said. Take a little suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the passage and pack all Jakkie’s things neatly in that, he’ll want them one day. One day he’ll want to see again what his teachers wrote there, his first composition book, his first swimming and rowing diplomas.

Suddenly I remember the whole hullabaloo. She made everything tumble down from the passage cupboard in searching for the right size of suitcase, small enough to fit into the sideboard, large enough for Jakkie’s things. It sounded as if she was kicking around the suitcases there in the passage.

The house has always spoken up when Agaat has taken a vow of silence. When could she have gone to replace the blue booklets in the sideboard? And how long ago did she start reading the first two packets? Just wasn’t up to the first little lot? 1953 to 1960, it’s written on the cover, the dates. That was how I divided them up when I tied them that time.

I could hear from the way in which she pulled up the railing of the bed’s head again that I was going to be subjected to more than hair-washing. That it was only the start.

Now she wants to manicure the whole imminent carcase. The full treatment. Everything has been set out neatly in a line. Pumice stone, nail scissors, files coarse and fine, razor, magnifying glass, tweezers. As if the cutting and plucking and shaving and filing will reveal something of my inner being. As if relieved of unwanted hair and nails and calluses, my shell will become transparent so that she can see my inner workings.

What does she think it will consist of? Gears, ratchets, cogs? A central axle driving everything? A little black humming box in which the motor is housed? A film on a reel, conducted through all the channels and grooves and spools? That’s where she wants to end up, at the still frames, to see what I think of her resistance, to find out what more I want, to see why on earth I carry on whingeing like that. Preferably she would want to dismantle me, unscrew all my components.

Why does she think they lie so deep?

They lie around ready to be salvaged, compared with everything else she has carried in here from the cellar. Everything that I said we should throw away and burn and give away. Everything that we set aside for her to keep.

Like a stage-prop store it looks in here. Beach hat, fish gaff, old black bathing costume from the year yon. From day to day the exhibition is changed. She makes me smell everything, presses it under my hand to feel.

How does she think she’s going to get everything out of here before Jakkie comes? Or is he not coming? Or is it all meant expressly for his eyes?

She’s well-practised in the art of leaving tracks. It was one of their regular games. Follow me if you can. Broken twigs she taught him to read, spitballs in the dust, scratch marks on bark, turned-over stones. As I had taught her.