Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

sings in high head-tones)

I’m the meal of the first milling

Rejoice oh young man your joy is short-lived

I’m the rising of the dough

The lump in the throat

I’m the mouth of the mother

I’m the faith of the father

And the babble of the baby in the bath

Come come bath in my hands

my hands my song of deformity (could that be? perhaps I mis-

heard here? & it just went on and on)

I’m the riches of the ridges

The palms of palmyra are mine

Where’s the what of the wattle?

Where the fen of the fennel?

With me!

I’m the end of the river-bend

And the breadth of the Breede

I’m the why of the whynot

I’m the where of the nowhere

I’m the blood of the bluegum.

Stop stop! Jakkie shouted please stop that’s enough! No that’s what you wanted isn’t it! A. said now you must listen! & she teases him because he doesn’t want to get out of the bath naked in front of her & he can’t run away & he just has to stay and listen there until she’s finished singing & then she sang even louder to irritate him & then she patched together a little tune with talking in-between a whole performance there in the steam condensing ever more densely on the windows.

I’m my brother’s keeper

His white apron strings

And the ash that turns to ashes

I have the tongues of fire of men and of angels

The riddle of riddle-bread I know

But my tongue is a stake in my mouth

Coals of fire I heap upon my head

Yes, less than lesser

The least amongst you

Bushwillow cedar and wild olive

The turn of the wheel is

the curl

of the tip

of the maidenhair fern

am I

On and on it went in that vein. Jesuschrist Agaat says Jakkie but you really can sit and sing a lot of shit on a box get going I want to get out now! but I heard him just now mutter-muttering in his voice that’s starting to break — my child! — growing up so fast! — there in his room heard him singing over & over on A.’s contrived tune her heathenish song that carries on to all sides.

the why of the whynot

the where of the nowhere

the mouth of the mother

the faith of the father & the blood

the blood of the bitter bluegum.

A church hat, a stuffed lynx head, a ram’s horn, a silver sugar-bowl, a braying-stone, a mouldboard. What a mess here in my room. I no longer want to look at anything, no longer want to be distracted by the light of day, the things of the light. They press on my eyeballs when I open my eyes. From now on I’m keeping my eyes shut, from now on I am gazing at the inside of my eyelids.

Unseeing in a more silent silence, in the black-red of shut eyes I want to lie, a cello in its case, in this made-to-measure niche that my body has become for me, here I want to dream my way to that whiter light of which the book of death speaks. Here I want only just to hear the last hurried footsteps in the passages, and there far away in the front of the hall, behind the last door swinging shut, the sounds of tuning, the concert, that without me may at last commence. I want to drift away from it all, replaced by a substitute who is following the conductor’s baton out there with shining eyes.

This savage parade, the last illuminations.

I have seen enough, heard enough of this procession. What must I still know or try to understand here? What is the message of the moribund air in this vault? Or is this how the sheet of a last summer rests on one, a white drift blown backward from the comb of the wave? As if it wants to tie the wave back into the body of the sea, so that its breaking is aborted, begrudging the final spuming, rushing foam?

Unfathomable that which still weighs on me here. A warmth on my cheek at times, on my forehead, on my stomach, on my ankles, a hand that hovers above me with the weight of a longing, longing to pluck a string, to touch the shady side of a stone. As a stone would feel it, I imagine I feel it, the subtle longings, longings of a mountain wind, or a wind-blown seed, of a stray drop or a tiny lizard, of a blade of grass leaning against me. To what do they seek to edify me, these delicate bodies that waver around me? To what do they seek to move me when they measure their insignificance against mine, sink their all-but-insensible weight into my weight?

At times it is something that vibrates on my breastbone as if the stick of a toy fan has been planted there. At times, late at night, it becomes a flagstaff in a high wind, and I hear a rope knocking against the pole.

When I feel something pressing on me, so, then I know I’m still alive.

My skin presses on me, an underfelt, a rain-wet canvas. My skin torments me. My skin wants to fashion from my flesh another layer, a last pressing of itself. For what purpose? Why does my body begrudge itself its own closure?

What more do I have to learn about all my redundant parts? What am I to understand from my skin that rejects me? My skin is shedding me instead of the other way round. My skin is one jump ahead of me.

What lesson is contained in this reluctant diminution?

As if the helplessness on its own were not instructive enough.

I’ve had enough. I want to become light now, harmless, manifold like seeds of the thistle, I want to drift from myself, blown away from the stalk, floating.

Dust. Wind. Ash. Why is it denied me for so long? Desiccation should run a swifter course. Dishevelment should be more untrammelled. For whose sake must I endure it, this last coherence? The trivial weight, the barren bits of friction, of sheet on body, of head on pillow, of upper lid against lower, of eyeball in socket?

As if it’s conceivable that of a whole concert only this would remain to listen to: The siffling of the sleeves encircling the wrists of the musicians, the creaking of the chairs on which they sit, the heaving of their breathing with the up and the down stroke of the bow, the riffling of the pages of the score. Only that, without the music. Harmless negative music, the soil without the cultivation.

A suite of last breaths I am. Solo breath with a dying fall. My breath weighs on me. Expelled it comes to rest on my chest and my chest refuses to rise again. My breath is lead, the opposite of what breath should be. I shed my lead from me, layer by layer.

If it is an art, then, of surrendering myself to weight, let it be heavy enough, dead weight, under which I am planished. Why still this margin of tolerance? Why this subtle pressure and chafing and surging about which I have to wonder, in which there is still warmth and something, a shadow of music, a light pulse billowing in my feet?

Can feet breathe? What then do I feel like a lung there under the arch of my foot? Is that how it begins when it begins? An inspiration from below? Something that lightens the heels?

Who will soothe my feet for me? Who could think up something like that on this rounded earth? Such a light nuzzling nudging together my ankles? Such a sweet weight breathing up against me? A cat, perhaps? A puppy, a hedgehog that Agaat has brought here to lie on my bed with me?

I open my eyes. It is she herself, it is Agaat sleeping at my feet.

She is lying with her head turned aside on her strong arm, the little thin arm is drooped over my ankles, the hand inside the sleeve all the way to the fingertips. My feet are lying against her chest, as if she’d gathered them there to hold them, like a child going to bed with a teddy-bear. To one side on the bed one of the Croxley booklets is lying open. I can make out the black ink, blots still from my old fountain pen. How many more? This is the last of the second packet if I remember rightly, and was there another packet? Were there three?