Agaat (42 page)

Agaat fiddles with my eyelids, she draws the upper lid over the lower, presses on the soft spots under my eyes, as if she wants to arrange them properly, living eyes, that don't just peel back for nothing.

So what kind of flickering is nooi Beatrice talking about?

Relax, Agaat, it's funny, can't you see? Come on, laugh a bit! Laugh so that I can hear it. I want to hear laughter. Laugh Agaat, I want to see what you look like when you laugh, when last did we have a really good joke here? The laughing corpses. The one with peeled-back eyes, the other one drunk on air. The one old ghost was lean and the other old ghost was fat, do you remember, Agaat, the song? We used to sing it to Jakkie when he was small, when we were bathing him. Then I blew out my cheeks and you sucked in your cheeks and I sang high and you sang low and then he crowed with laughter.

Agaat pulls here and pushes there in the room. She's too much off her stride to interpret me. What matters now is what it looks like to outsiders.

Tsk, she says, here the stretcher still is, clean forgot!

She slams shut the camp stretcher, goes to stow it in the passage cupboard, prepares for inspection. Then she looks in the mirror. Just look at me now, she says. She pins her cap on straight. I catch her eye in the mirror. She's standing with a mouth full of hairpins. I've never seen Agaat pinning her cap in place.

Sorry, Ounooi, she mumbles through the pins, just let me pull myself together here.

Agaat, I flicker, please, can't you see how funny it is?

I'm coming Ounooi, I'm coming, I must explain nicely to baas Thys, I must go and see where nooi Beatrice is now.

Let the woman be, let her be, didn't you hear what she said? She doesn't doctor coons.

Agaat comes closer.

What are you saying, Ounooi? I'm causing scandal here? No, that's not what you're saying.

I roll my eyes back to the garden where Beatrice is now wringing her tiny hands, I show how I peeled back my eyes for her. I peel my eyes back and back, I flicker them, I look straight at her, I laugh. Over and over in the same sequence I explain. I make my eyes shine, I make my eyes sparkle.

Agaat, but look, look, I have only my eyes to tell a joke, my dear Agaat who wants to breathe on my behalf and falls asleep wearing an oxygen mask, laugh then, laugh with me!

A smile steals across Agaat's mouth.

Ho Ounooi, you didn't really pretend? Act?

She can't say it.

Yes, you've got it, you've got it, I Milla de Wet, née Redelinghuys, who has been lying here for months now on my back wasting away, I today pretended, yes, feigned, yes acted out the dance of death, so do your bit. If I can mock, how much more can't you? It's the last joke, can't you see?

Right, says Agaat, very funny. But this is not the time for games. You heard who all was being informed.

Exactly, Agaat, the whole titocracy wants to see the double-decker suicide!

Cars arrive in the yard, the dogs bark.

All the stuff in the sitting room, says Agaat. They must just not think I'm trying to rob you.

She's left before I can stop her. She's going to establish a firebreak at the front door. Agaat, but here you are alive and kicking! Questions, exclamations. She tries to explain. Thys and the dominee and Magda the cadaver connoisseur. Agaat does not invite them in. But they want to see, see with their own eyes. They press past her. But she gets to the front, I hear her soles in the passage, backwards, backwards. She precedes them into the room, her arms wide as if she wants to dam them up behind her apron. She signals at me with the eyes, I'm sorry I couldn't stop them. She comes to stand by my bed. Puts her hand on my shoulder.

I am framed, I am pre-eminent, my moment of glory. I turn my eyes slowly from her to the company clustering in the doorway craning their necks. I look at my neighbours, the keepers of law and order, the purveyors of benevolence, the profferers of prayers, the conjurers of contumely and catastrophe. One by one I cull their stares, until I have collected them all in mine, the stupefaction and the shame, and the fear.

We are prepared for the season, the ounooi and I, says Agaat. We have fruitcake and tea for you all, don't we Ounooi?

I blink my eyes slowly in affirmation. And I point them with an extended wink in the direction of the sitting room.

Go forth. Eat cake.

But now they're in a hurry. No, they don't want to sit down.

I listen to Agaat taking leave of the guests at the door.

He is so grateful for the good hands in which her ounooi finds herself, says the dominee.

We do our best, says Agaat.

I'll settle the hash of the sheep-stealers, says the sergeant.

Rather bring the troops, says Agaat, the robbers work in teams.

Twock-twock-twock Thys descends the stoep staircase in his big shoes.

Have a nice day, Agaat, bye-bye, Magda calls gaily.

Not a sound from Beatrice.

The doors slam. The cars pull off. The dogs bark.

The joke of the afternoon seems small. A small forlorn joke. I can feel it seeping out of me. I feel heavy. I feel dense. I don't feel sad. I feel tired. Agaat is sad. I know, I can feel it.

She remains standing on the stoep. She calls the dogs back. I hear them panting. I close my eyes. I can picture their tails wagging, their open-mouthed laughing with her. They come to have their heads stroked.

Look at you Boela, where have you been again?

Her voice comes with an effort. She tries to bend it into shape by talking to the dogs, appropriating the liveliness of dogs. Dogs that can come and go and wallow in the dust, in dead things, to appropriate the smell for themselves, to get up and to scrabble with the back feet.

Come here, Koffie, but my goodness, you too. Where do you find mud to roll in now? Oh sis, but you stink!

Agaat doesn't come in. I can see her standing there. She watches the gate being opened and closed. She remains there longer than usual. She watches the cars turning off into the main road, the billows of dust getting smaller and disappearing over the hill. She feels the weight of the
evening waiting, she smells the last still black water of the drift, she sees the dark mountain rearing up and the black tree-tops of Grootmoedersdrift.

But that's better than nothing, it's better than me in my white bed in here.

She does not want to come in.

She does not want to enter the house. But there is nowhere else. Nothing else. Not as long as I'm here. This is the cup. This is the book. Drink it, turn its pages.

Ai, I hear, look at how dry you are.

I hear her go down the stoep steps. Water on the cement. It's the garden hose. The water splat-splats in a feeble stream. Agaat is watering the pot plants. She talks to them. She wants me to hear. That is how I taught her. Plants flourish when you talk to them, especially in pots. They grow shiny leaves. That's their reply.

Virgin's tears, she says, hen-and-chickens, hoya, Mackaya bella, delicious monster, peace in the home.

Tonight she gets no further than a roll-call.

The hose drags around to the other side of the stoep. One thing leads to another. Now it's the bed right under the stoep that the irrigation doesn't always reach.

Agaat is buying time. She considers what next. She makes plans. How to proceed. How to keep things well-aired and well-lit. Coping with the evening, coping with the morning.

One pot, another pot is dragged across the stoep. Wet terracotta gritty on the cement. The early December move. Then the late-afternoon sun shines in under the veranda and dries everything out.

There, now you're out of the heat, says Agaat.

She grunts as she comes upright.

Everything is wet. The tap has been closed. The pots have been moved. Now she must in. Now she can't do anything else. But it's grown dark. She has somewhere to start. The curtains to draw, the table lamps to switch on. A sign of life she can give. This is a farm. People are living here. Sweetenough's the name of the wife, Goodenough's the name of the maid.

I hear her at the front door. She wipes her feet on the cane mat. Once, twice, checks under the soles, once more. A sigh. Then she's in. She closes the door, locks, latches from the inside. She looks at the latch. She turns round. She looks at the sitting room. She takes one step in, another, she's on the carpet. Now she's ready. Now the hand does what it finds to do, the left hand in front, the right hand behind.

I hear a curtain, another, I hear a note, a phrase. Then she finds the tune. Then I find it. It's for me, Agaat, I know, sing for me there in the sitting room.
Blow the wind southerly
, she hums. She knows it from the old record of Kathleen Ferrier. Did we throw it away with the clearing-out? Her voice is weak. She clears her throat, starts again.

Sing, Agaat. You sing the old-old tunes. Sing the songs of yesteryear. The music of the front room. Sing of the wind round the corners of the house, the south-easter, the north-wester. The song of the window frames, of the door frames and the curtains, of the standard lamps and the carpet with the red flowers and the sideboard of dark imbuia that has surrendered its secrets. And the riempie chairs and the riempie bench and the round table in the corner. The mute words of people, the still dense things, the old ornaments from which at the beginning you couldn't keep your eyes. Are you touching, now, Diana and her tame wolves in old brown porcelain? Do you pick up the little copper Indian shoe, the shoe in which you always in spring put the kukumakranka for me? And the swans of white blown glass, do you touch their necks and do you see the green vase for freesias, the blue one full of daffodils, the big grey vase that you stuck together, the one for the wild flowers of September, for the first blue lupins, for the blue-purple hydrangeas?

Sing softly of the evening's coming and of the evening meal, the sausage and eggs and the red tomatoes and the fresh loaf with the crackled brown crust, the milk in the jug that was a wedding gift, the square of butter under glass. The white tablecloth, the oven glove around the ears of the black iron saucepan, the sitting-down, the hands under low light, around the knives, around the forks, the spoons with the ivory handles, the people who look at each other, or do not look, speak to each other, or do not speak, or speak without words. Sing, that you may be consoled. Because that you now have to do for yourself, as you've always had to do.

Oh sing, sing, Agaat, of the wind that blows from the south and the ship in the offing, because it is in the offing. I see it in the distance. White is its bow and its splines are white and it's coming over the hump-backed hills, closer I see it coming, ever closer.

I understand. You don't think my joke this afternoon was funny. It's a sad song, that's all.

I open my eyes. The lights are suddenly on in the room.

Look, says Agaat, with all the hubbub you haven't even seen yet.

She points next to my bed.

The rainbow is gone. Now there is a mountain with a vlei in front of it. It is full of white water-hawthorn. The mountains reflect a darkness
amongst the flowers. An early-morning scene, a painting from the sitting room. I thought we had thrown it away.

The blue blue hills of home, says Agaat, I went and fetched it from the cellar.

And look here, the portrait of the grandmother. I thought you might want to see it once more.

It's the portrait in front of which my mother used to make me stand when I was small. Her hand heavy on my shoulder. Look, Milla, it's she who farmed into being this little plot of earth. One day it will be yours.

A matriarch in the making, her mouth young, her plump white fingers folded round a rolled-up document, her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, her cheeks two touched-up red stains, the collar around her neck of fine white lace, the one eye small and fierce, the other one larger, clear-sighted, the eye over which something reflects distractingly on the gibbous glass of the oval frame, a rectangle of white, my bed, a smudge of grey, my head, my grey hair on the pillow.