Agaat (25 page)

She puts her hand into her apron pocket.

Close your eyes.

She places something in my hand, something cool and smooth it is, she holds her hand under my hand.

Open your eyes.

It's a big brown egg.

A double-yolk, I bet, she says. Tonight I'm making you scrambled egg, Ounooi, you've been eating far too little of late. Not a lot into you, not a poop out of you. And I haven't embroidered a stitch. We must eat early tonight. I want to get working.

Work, for the night is coming, that's what I think, but what I signal is: that will be nice, I've been wanting an egg for a long time.

Then that's fine, says Agaat, a good appetite is not to be sneezed at and a wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse.

I close my eyes. I can't trust my gaze. Better not take any chances. Give no cause for misunderstanding. Rejoice in the success of the first round.

I hear her clatter in the kitchen. It sounds extremely lively in there tonight. Renewed effort? At what? Courage for what lies ahead? How long? The yolk and the white are whisked together. From cradle to grave. The screen door slams. She goes in and out at the kitchen door. Scrambled eggs. What an ado simply to scramble an egg? Sounds like a five-course. I can feel her excitement. Positive energy. The Cape is Dutch again, how long can it last?

She brings my tray. A candle? A vase? And, for the first time again in how many months—a twig of the rambling rose! Crepuscule! Floppy copper-coloured petals, the inside darker, a lively rust colour, a Cape
robin's bib. The evening has been brought indoors for me.

The eye is the window of the soul, but a mirror helps, says Agaat. A picture of primness, but I can see she's very pleased with her handiwork.

She cranks down my bed.

Lower the sheep, she says through her breathing.

She pulls herself up on her stool.

Raise the girl, she says. Her voice is soft, palliative.

The egg goes down well. She has brought it to the exact degree of just-done, but still good and moist, and, if I must judge, strained it twice through a tea-strainer so that the texture is uniformly smooth.

Without hurry she spoons up the egg pulp in small spoonfuls, and brings it inside, sees to it that I swallow, once, twice, everything without emphasis.

Her little hand is resting on my waist, in its white crocheted sleeve. With that she gauges my breathing so that she can bring in the teaspoonfuls at the right rhythm and tempo. Her starched clothes make a sound every time she leans forward, the shoulder bands of the apron as they tense and relax, her arms as they rub against the turn-ups of her sleeves. The stool creaks rhythmically as she shifts her weight.

I am hungry. There is something beneficent about the taste of the egg. It tastes of butter and cream. Agaat wants to pamper me, and herself, for the breakthrough, for my gratitude.

I understand the bustle back there. I can see her, spatula in the little hand, the bowl with the whisked-up egg in the strong hand, standing by the frying-pan in which the butter is already foaming, and then suddenly having an idea, putting everything down, removing the pan from the heat, and in the falling dusk going to the dairy to ladle a little jug of fresh cream from the pail. For scrambled egg de luxe. And how the one inspiration inspires another. In and out at the screen door as it occurs to her. She went and picked a twig of parsley, from the pot next to the back door, and put it on the side of the plate, too dangerous even to sprinkle finely-chopped on the egg, but for the look, and for the smell. She crushes the leaves between the fingers of her right hand, she holds it under my nose. Her lips come forward, her eyes glisten.

I smell it, Agaat.

Ai, Ounooi Ounooi, say Agaat's eyes. She looks away. My face is too much for her. She divides it up into manageable fragments. Under my nose she mops up a drop, from my forehead she whisks away something that's not there. She puts another teaspoonful of egg into my mouth.

I eat a highway through the double-yolk.

It's a wind-still evening. Agaat has opened the swing doors so that I can hear the yard-noise of milk cans and the returning tractors and the closing of shed doors.

Now it has gone quiet. Now I hear only the sprinklers and the pump down by the old dam, that Dawid will go to switch off at ten o'clock. Closer by is the twilight song of thrushes and Cape robins, a light rustling every now and again in the bougainvillea on the stoep, a few slight sleeping sounds of the small birds, sparrows, white-eyes, that settle there for the night in the centre of the bush.

On the mirror an abstract painting is limned, midnight-blue like the inside of an iris, with the last dusk-pale planes and dark stains from which one can surmise that the garden is deep and wide, full of concealed nooks, full of the silence of ponds, full of small stipples of reflected stars on the wet leaves, full of the deep incisions of furrows. Green, wet fragrances of the night pour into the room, from water on lawns and on hot-baked soil and dusty greenery.

I smell it, Agaat. Everything that you have prepared before me.

She removes the spray of roses in the little crystal vase from the tray and places it next to my bed on the night-table with the candle.

Had enough? Was it good? Are you feeling better now? No way you could have gone to sleep on such a hungry stomach.

She clears away the tray, switches off the main lights.

Now how about warm milk, with sugar and a drop of vanilla?

That's good, later, I gesture.

On her way out she takes her embroidery out of the basket. She looks in the little blue book lying on the chair. She reads the last page and sighs. She searches through the pile, pulls out another. She puts it down on the embroidery. I can always tell when she wants to give up the reading, when she becomes disheartened with it. But these are her two projects. She doesn't leave a thing half-done. Especially when she doesn't yet know how it is to end.

The candle casts a glow on the wall next to my bed. In it stirs the shadow of the crepuscule in the glass vase. Longer and shorter stretch and shrink the buds. The air freshens from the window. It billows the gauze lining at the open doors outwards and inwards. The flame stirs, casts a silhouette of stems on the wall, crystal and water and tiny air bubbles trouble the light. Doubly magnified in the shadow on the wall where he perches in the rose twigs, front feet clasped together, I see the praying mantis.

She wouldn't bring a thing like that in here without intention. The most exemplary motionless creature she could think of. Little hands
folded in prayer. The green membranous wings like coat-tails draped over the abdomen, the triangular head with the bulbous eyes.

I look at the mirror. I see the candle flame and its yellow glow, the shadows, the coruscation of the water, the vase, the rose, the spriggy limbs of the praying mantis. These then are the things reflecting in the three panels where the garden has now darkened. When the flame stirs, the shadows dance, the reflections of the shadows dance, the supplicant raises its front legs in the rose.

Does a mirror sometimes preserve everything that has been reflected in it? Is there a record of light, thin membranes compressed layer upon layer that one has to ease apart with the finger-tips so that the colours don't dissipate, so that the moments don't blot and the hours don't run together into inconsequential splotches? So that a song of preserved years lies in your palm, a miniature of your life and times, with every detail meticulous in clear, chanting angel-fine enamel, as on the old manuscripts, at which you can peer through a magnifying glass and marvel at so much effort? So many tears for nothing? For light? For bygone moments?

A floating feeling takes possession of me, to and fro I look between the shadow picture on the wall and the reflection in the mirror. A story in a mirror, second-hand. About what was and what is to be. About what I have to come to in these last days and nights. About how I must get there over the fragments I am trying to shore. I step on them, step, as on stones in a stream. Agaat and I and Jak and Jakkie. Four stepping-stones, every time four and their combinations of two, of three, their powers to infinity and their square roots. Their sequences in time, their causes and effects. How to join and to fit, how to step and to say: That is how I crossed the river, there I walked, that was the way to here. How to remember, without speech, without writing, without map, an exile within myself. Motionless. Solid. In my bed. In my body. Shrunken away from the world that I created. With images that surface and flow away, flakes of light that float away from me so that I cannot remember what I have already remembered and what I have yet to remember. Am I the stream or am I the stone and who steps on me, who wades through me, to whom do I drift down like pollen, like nectar, like a fragrance, always there are more contents to be ordered into coherence.

Through the open doors I smell the night ever more intensely. It permeates my nose like a complex snuff. Can one smell sounds? I hear the dikkops, from a northerly direction. Christmas, christmas, christmas, they cry in descending tones, christmas comes. The yard plovers cry as they fly up, a disturbance at the nest? The frogs strike up, white
bibs bulging in the reeds. Under the stoep a cricket starts filing away at its leg-irons. Here next to my head something prays in the void. That I may be permitted to make the journey one more time, on stippled tracks for my eyes, pursuing place names that are dictated to me, the last circuit, a secret, a treasure that neither moth nor rust can destroy, a relation, a sentence hidden amongst words.

Suddenly I see Agaat. In the dark door-cavity with the tray in her hands. She's watching me from the shadows, I can't make out her face, just the cap, a small white tomb in the air.

Would she sometimes simply be curious, an onlooker at a fainting incident in the street, a visitor to a cage in which a snake is shedding its skin? How would I ever know? How could I hold it against her? How would I want her to look at me here where I am lying?

I close my eyes. I thought she'd already left for the kitchen. I wouldn't, after all that, have dared look around again. Not if I had known she was still there. I hear her walk down the passage, turn round, walk back slowly. She's in the spare room. She stands still.

I count to twelve before she moves again. I hear her put down the tray in the kitchen but then none of the usual, the sounds of clearing the tray on the work surface, of scraping leftovers into the bin, filling the washbasin with water, washing and drying and packing away dishes, taking her own plate out of the warming oven, the sound of the kettle being filled for her tea, pulling out and pulling up the kitchen chair and then, as always, the silence as she eats her evening meal. None of this I hear.

She walks around the house, every now and again she stops, a few paces to this side, a few paces to that, and then stops again. In the dining room, in the living room, in the sitting room, in the entrance hall I hear the floorboards creak and then again down the passage on her rubber soles she walks, tchi-tchi-tchi past my door, a glance at my bed, further along to Jakkie's room, to the spare room, a hesitation before the walk to the back room, and back again down the passage and back and stop and carry on. I can hear her thinking. I can feel her looking for empty spaces. The already-cleared house that echoes lightly. Out at the back door now. Keys. It's the big bunch. First the storage rooms in the back, then round the front.

What is she whistling for me to hear there where she is in the dark?

Oh ye'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road . . .

What is that rattling under my bed? The cellar door? Here right beneath me in the right wing? What would she be looking for there?

Muffled from below the floorboards, under the concrete floor layer, the whistling sounds just loud enough so that I can make out the tune.

An' I'll be in Scotland before ye' . . .

The extra mile, Leroux said, that woman walks the extra mile for you.