Agaat (24 page)

What an ado about nothing every day!

What a farce!

Pastime, Agaat calls it sometimes. Respite. Of late she's taken to reading me poems from the collections circulated by the South African ALS support group. Who will get them after me? Such recyclable frail-care books, it's as good as bequeathing your coffin to the next candidate for one day's lying-in-state.

And now in the midst of so much attrition, the light comes and announces itself in my room like an unfamiliar word. Like a word that you recognise as a word but of which the meaning just evades you. Sculp. Scullogue. Scuggery. Scuffle-hunter. Agaat's and my dictionary games. What will she play with me now, now that words fall ever more into disuse in this room? Light-and-shadow chess?
Trompe l'oeil
?

Now I know what it is! It's the dressing table!

It's turned differently, at an angle towards the stoep side. The two side panels have been adjusted. Like the wings of a thing flying forward, and stumbling the last stretch, yearning to catch up with something, to capture.

There's a view of the garden in the mirror, but sharper, clearer than a garden can be. My garden I see there, cut out on three levels, abounding with detail, the most alluring prospects.

It's cornflowers I see, deep blue cornflowers in the one wing and in the other wing a cascade of long bent stems of light-blue agapanthus. And crepusculating on the central panel, in a pool of jacaranda shade, the voluptuous powder-blue heads of hydrangeas in full flower.

Cautiously I sip at it, choking with emotion would spell the premature end of this story. Could Agaat have started understanding me, at last! If it wasn't coincidence, if she could get that far merely on the basis of eye signals, endless possibilities remain ahead, then I mustn't spoil it now with an attack of sentimentality.

The mirror reveals a perfect result. The best I've ever experienced the garden. This is how I had always imagined the north-east side could look. I planned it in terms of all the different shades of blue in the catalogues. This is how I imagined it. Blue perennials, iris, agapanthus, hydrangea, bushes of kingfisher daisies, annuals sowed in the low borders every year, first for the winter plain blue pansies and forget-menots that started coming up by themselves in tract upon tract and then ageratum for spring, and after that for summer, cornflower, cornflower, and again cornflower. Because of blue one can never have enough in the barren yellow and brown of summer and also not in winter when it must help the rains to fall as the old people believed.

Now Agaat has arranged it for me in mirrors, a vision. How shall I know whether she reacted to my request or if it was mere chance?

Or could she have been planning it for a long time? First the emptying out of my room, the drawn curtains and now the light, the restoration of colour and objects? So that I, as I am drained of myself, can fill up with what is outside myself, as the poet says? So that something can start floundering upstream in the run-off? You never know with Agaat. She is witched. Sometimes I think she's playing games with herself, and I'm a mere excuse for her inventions.

In the beginning she arranged fresh flowers in the vases every day, as she knew I liked it, but then Leroux apparently said we should beware of dust and pollen and insects.

That was Agaat's story.

Perhaps she's sorry now, wants to make up for it now.

As always at this time of the day shadows are playing on the wall next to my bed, but now there are lively stipples of light, points of blue, a general tint of agapanthus cast on it by the mirror.

A multiplied garden.

One visible through the window, one in the mirror, one on the wall.

How long could it have taken her? How many times of walking to and fro, softly so as not to wake me?

Perhaps she flew, changed herself into a dragonfly. Or a wasp. Landed on my pillow, her head in line with mine, to see through my eyes, and then back to adjust the angle, the angle of the dressing table, the angle of the three panels in relation to me, to one another, to the cornflowers, to fit everything together. One degree to this side or that side could lose the hydrangeas, could include a chunk of brown stoep wall instead of a bed full of blue flowers.

And then there are still the maps, Agaat, what must I do to get them? Heaven and earth it would seem you would move in order to have me buried in a cheerful and contented state. You'll see to it that I'm not left here impaled like a grasshopper on a thorn.

Poor Jak. What makes me think of him now?

Perhaps he's wandering around restlessly. Perhaps he's approaching now through the wattles to see what's become of me. For him it was all so sudden. One two three, I'm coming! Premature! No time for second thoughts. His mouth was gaping with it, his eyes as big as saucers. Good Lord, now I have an urge to laugh! Our father who art in heaven, that I want for breath to laugh! Earlier Leroux thought it was one of the symptoms of my bulbar paralysis, these uncontrolled fits of laughter of mine, but they were always about Jak. It was always about that trajectory. What goes up must come down, there's no escaping that. But the curve of the arc differs from case to case. As I got progressively sicker, I
started wondering more and more whether it would be better to go like him, and then I always started laughing.

Wretched Jak, Hollywood to the last gasp, or perhaps not Hollywood, at most a Leon Schuster farce.

Two days after his death I said to Agaat: Clear out, pack all the papers in boxes so that the executors can come and collect them, carry everything else out into the back here, everything so that we can sort it. I didn't want to see anything more of him. The car I had towed away immediately without further ado, I didn't want to have to stare at it every time I drove out.

Ai, the baas, the baas, Agaat said with a straight face when she came in with the piles of photos and asked what she should do with them all.

Throw away, I said, take them all to be burnt, everything, out, away, I have no use for them. Just roll up the maps nicely for me.

About the racquets and the training-bench and the weights and the abdomen-strengthener and the mountaineering ropes and the crash-helmets and the knee-guards and the calf-vibrator and the lumbar-massage wheels and the electrical foot-palpitator I wondered, a sale I thought, an auction, but I didn't feel up to the faces of the people. I had it all carried to the scrap-iron heap behind the implements shed. From there, I knew, it would in time be drawn, with the rusted ploughshares and old pieces of corrugated iron, into the recycling vortices of the farm.

That was in 1985. For years after that I would see the children on the farm walking around with the medals around their necks or playing in the dust with the silver trophies. That's all they retained of Jak, his toys. And the adults who experienced it, to this day I sometimes hear them talk amongst themselves about the spectacle. The master of Grootmoedersdrift, shrike-spiked like a beetle.

Jak's law books and action novels, his piles of magazines and photo-books full of sports heroes, catalogues of sports cars and expedition diaries of mountaineers and sunglassed adventurers in the Alps and the Sahara and the Amazon and the South Pole I donated to the town library. I immediately regretted doing it. The little librarians gazed wide-eyed at the material, as if they wanted to ask how I'd handled all that virile energy. As if they wondered how a mouse-face like me could have kept up with all the grandiose flights of fancy of my Camel Man.

But that one could never try to explain to the Swellendam town librarian. And also not to the chairlady of the Women's Agricultural Union. Her I didn't even warn that a mirror was imminent, a wall-sized mirror that had covered one whole side of Jak's office. I had its panels unscrewed and packed and delivered to Dot Stander's house with the
message that it might be just the thing for fitting out the hall where the annual flower show was held. Forget-me-not, I thought, I'd often gone myself to clean the mirror there, the sweat-spatterings and the other splotches, I didn't want the servants to see them.

Only the maps I kept, the old map of conveyance, the one that I'd found amongst my heirlooms after Ma's death, with the little painted pictures of all the special places on the farm. That map was the most original of the collection. Then there was the old transfer-duty map with the boundaries and beacons. And the water map on which the rivers and the underground veins of water, the boreholes and watering places and the fountains were shown, and later the surveyor's map when the irrigation scheme from the Theewaterskloof and the Duivenhoks was laid on. And the topographical map with the fall of all the slopes marked on it, the contour lines, the heights above sea level written on every numbered hill and mountain slope. Jak later had the rest requisitioned and ordered from the divisional council, district maps with all the other farms in the vicinity. On these you could see that Grootmoedersdrift was the biggest farm in the area and had the best soil and commanded the best grootbos, fynbos and the best water catchment area. The big soil composition map I'd had compiled by Agricultural Technical Services with, incorporated on it, the photos of the vertical sections showing all the soil types of Grootmoedersdrift, the red sand and the yellow sand on brittle stone, the clay loam and the sandy loam and the riverine turf. Then there was also the whole of South Africa, and a world map, Jakkie's school maps on which he and his father drew with compasses and calculations the exact proportions and location of Grootmoedersdrift darted with dovetailed arrows.

Roll them all up together, tie them with string, I said to Agaat, and put them in the sideboard with the photo albums. They belong with our records.

It can't be long now before she remembers it.

The garden hangs suspended, shimmering, in the mirror, a blue cradle, a nest dandled in the afternoon light. I hear a rustling. In the mirror I see a veil of mist irrigation slowly precipitating over the flowerbeds. The leaves scintillate, the stems start bending as the flower-heads grow heavier, my garden in all its glory.

The back door opens. Quarter past five. Agaat has been to collect the eggs before the skunks can carry them off. I can hear from her footsteps that she's carrying a precious cargo, the round-bellied basket with straw in the bottom. I can imagine how it was. Grope-grope under the puffed up bibs of the lay-away chickens. Softly clucking the tip of the
tongue against the roof of the mouth, so that they shouldn't take fright, the close watching of the hen, her austere yellow-rimmed bead-eye, because she can be vicious and peck the hand that's pilfering her eggs. Amongst the prickly-pear trees Agaat would have gone to look, behind the chicken run, under the pomegranate bushes, in the quince avenue, next to the old orchard. All the lay-away places she would have traced.

She carries the basket to the pantry, she takes the egg cartons off the shelf to fill them. How the good hand takes the red-brown eggs, the dunnish dust-brown ones, the small-yolked ones one-by-one out of the basket and assesses them, the largest apart, for selling in town, how she eases them into the little hollows, large ends downwards, half-dozens full. A quarter-hour chimes. From the time it takes, I guess that there are more than a dozen eggs today. Now she will write the date on the box, as we always did. What day would it be today?

A map of days, a calendar, that I have and that she writes on every day. But I can't see that far any more. And what do I care for time? One day is like another in this decoction she has devised for me. Purgatory according to Agaat.

There was peace and tranquillity after Jakkie's departure, after Jak's death, for the first time in a long while on Grootmoedersdrift. Not an obdurate eye, not a hunched shoulder, and the mouth gentled for a change, the lips often livened up with a smile. How long was it, the truce? Five, six, seven years? Until I got sick, but the first year, year-and-a-half, while I could still move myself, with my walking sticks, with the walking frame, in the wheelchair, then still it was all love and harmony. I could hardly believe it, sheer bliss, I thought, Freuden sonder Zahl, to enjoy my old age with her. When did it change? When I could no longer speak, when I could no longer write, when I became completely helpless and had to come and lie here? Was it that that released the poison? That I was more dependent on her than I'd ever been? I've always been that, from the beginning. But with every step of my retrogression it felt to me she was becoming more rancorous, more furious. Had she pent it up all those years?

I hear her going back to the kitchen, I hear the water from the tap, that's for filling the kettle for coffee. Her late-afternoon coffee so that she can remain awake for the evening shift. The silence while she drinks it. I can feel her thinking something, considering something. Then she comes down the passage, more slowly, stands still and turns back to the pantry.

It's very quiet.

Agaat has a plan. The one sprouts forth from the other. The drill has struck water.

I pretend to be asleep when she comes into the room. I spy on her through my eye-lashes. She regards the wall next to my bed where the blue specks of light play. Didn't think it would work so well, did you? I wish I could say that to her. I see a little incipient smile. She comes closer, even closer, she comes and stands by my bed, bends, until her head is at my height. There's a wisp of straw in her hair behind the gable of her cap. Lay-away chicken nest! She comes upright, looks down at me. I open my eyes and find hers.

I've seen it! I blink.

I flash my eyes at the wall, at the mirror, to and fro, try to move my eyebrows. Thank you very much! It's wonderful, Agaat, my garden.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who has the loveliest garden of them all? she asks.

Satisfaction on her face.