Agaat (65 page)

Put in a bookmark, she says then, then we can remember where we were, this is one of your long stories again, and I can't see how it's to end.

She goes to stand by the stoep door and looks out. Or she takes up after a while where we left off, and leaves me talking to myself.

Just go ahead and forget that I'm here, her face says, I just spell out everything for you and say it out loud so that you can hear what you sound like.

She can't always keep her voice neutral. She charges my sentences with her own resonances. Disbelief, emphasis, mockery. She adds on and improvises. To my own ears I sound like running commentary rather than original intention.

Sometimes when we've completed a sentence, she doesn't repeat it at all, so that I lose my thread amongst stray words.

Sorry. Powerless. Guilty. I am. I shall be. But. How am I to. Die. Question mark.

Then she changes the subject. Or she says, for heaven's sake get to the point, Ounooi, you're much too long-winded again today.

As if there were endless days extending before me. As if tomorrow could be much different for me from today.

It takes so much time, this business. Clarity is not guaranteed. It causes misunderstandings instead, that we then laboriously have to clear up again. The tapping and winking and spelling is harder on my eyes than the splint ever was heavy on my hand. Her prefabricated phrases block me rather than help me, my language feels like a brutal instrument with which I'm torturing myself. How long will I still be able to blink my eyes? The left wants to droop shut, the right opens wider than I'm used to. If my eyelids freeze, that's the end.

The chance, I'm getting a last chance. Perhaps I should rather associate freely than try to explain point by point, let her see who I've become in the meantime, here speechless on my bed, delirious, yearning, a poet of losses, a teller of legends.

The task weighs more heavily on my mind than the writing of my last words when I could still write. It's more momentous than the making of my inventories for the clearing-out, my will, my self-determination codicil.

It's more difficult than any last wish. It causes complications at a stage when she, and I, had hoped that things would become easier. Now the close will be more difficult than either of us could ever have predicted.

I can understand very well that she wants to keep the talking within limits, has established a fixed structure for it. She keeps us to it strictly. One hour in the morning, one hour in the evening.

Before she goes to bed, I'm granted another few sentences, if she feels the need herself, when she's done reading from the blue booklets, the last parcel from the sideboard, the first lot that I filled with my writing, without abbreviations, full particulars with the explicitness of the beginner.

She took a long time to remove the string with which it was still bound. The first few days that it was lying here, she fiddled with the knot a few times, but then let it be again. At length she snipped it off with her scissors and started reading in a whispered intake of breath, as if she wanted to vacuum the words.

When she's had enough, then she gets up, then she takes the duster. Then I know it helps her to talk to me, but mostly about trivialities. Harmless.

It helps her to believe that I'm harmless. She even wants to believe in my goodness, it seems to me. But then I have to be potent as well, because what would virtue be for Agaat without power?

That's something she can't tolerate.

If on the other hand, as happens on some days, she makes me out to be entirely bad, then she feels that she's bad herself. And that she doesn't want to be. That she can't be. Her name is Good.

Would it be good to forgive me? It would be too easy. And it would solve nothing.

Would it be good to take revenge? It's been a long time since that satisfied her, avenging yourself on a helpless victim is not interesting.

How can I help her?

Too many sentences to spell out. I must keep my text simple. I can't tell her story on her behalf, and if she's too tongue-tied and has too little pride to do it herself, then it's not my fault.

How many Jerseys do you now have in your herd? That I'm allowed to ask. How many heifers are you going to sell in autumn? What's your price? What does the market look like? She supplies the figures.

If you carry on like this, you're going to be a rich farmer one day, I'm allowed to say.

What good is it going to do me? her face asks then. When she sees that I've caught her out in self-pity, she backtracks quickly. As with the tirade yesterday.

Yes, I just have to give, give, give nowadays to keep the labourers happy. The creatures of late seem to want to guzzle and guts, even steal the dogs' food out of their bowls around the back. Before you fell ill they were still happy with flour and coffee and now and again their smoked pork and their sack of beans and onions and pumpkins. But no, now it's a sheep a month on top of it, and then I have to provide for the women and children as well, if the one isn't suffering from this, then the other complains of that. They eat you out of house and home and they're too lazy to work, they just want to lie in their hovels. I told Dawid a long time ago the whole lot must go, I want casual labourers, or better still, I get in a team of Transkei kaffirs every now and again, they're happy anyway with mealie-meal porridge and sour milk.

I said nothing in reply. And she knew why.

In the silence that followed, she took up her embroidery and sat working wordlessly for two hours. That's the way it often goes since we've been able to talk, as if she's trying to gather strength for the next conversation.

She's sitting just too far away for me to see what's she's doing there on her cloth.

She'll show me when she's done, she says.

Apparently it contains all the stitches in the book.

Diagonal ripple-stitch, odd wave-stitch, step-stitch, honeycomb-stitch, blanket-stitch, hemstitch, paving-stitch, wreath-stitch.

There's still a lot to fill in, she says, filling-in patterns for drawn-fabric work, sheaves, ears of corn, stars, eyelets, flowers, diamonds, wheels, shadow-blocks.

Some parts she has to unpick and redo, though much smaller, otherwise not everything fits in so well. It takes much longer than she thought to get everything in place, she says.

Everything? Every what thing? Rather say it's a pastime till I'm in my place six feet under.

Sometimes when I can no longer bear it, the two of us together like this, trapped in the room, without any escape, I plead without disguise. I flicker through my tears. One eye flutters more rapidly than the other.

Please, talk to me, I want to talk, I want to explain things.

Sometimes she consents, but venture one sentence into the maze, and she stops.

Look for the butterfly, Agaat! You've seen it before! Show it to me!

But mainly she ignores it when I'm like that. Mouth set in a sulk. Chin out. Her eyes flash. The message is clear.

Your soul! Me having to look for your soul! Bugger your soul!

I can guess what she's feeling, what sentences she's addressing to me in her heart. Once I spelt it out for her word by word.

It's too late for tears now, tears just make you choke. So choose. Choke or talk about things you can afford to talk about.

She pretended not to understand whose words these were.

I never cry, she said, you're the one who cries.

Just so, I said.

She just gave me a look and walked out.

I'm not made of glass, she said later, while she was soaping my arms.

She was washing me very gently. I don't think I'd ever felt her touch me so gently, as if she were afraid I'd break.

I'm not made of glass.

She knows she's transparent to me, she knows I can read her thoughts and express them too. It's no longer all that safe for her in this sickbay. She's decided to restore my voice to me. And she wants to honour her decision. She knows she's caught in her own snare.

Gently she soaped me. Once more on an inhalation she said: Not of glass!

She was washing my arm with her strong hand. The washcloth disappeared a long time ago. My skin is too thin. When she saw the dampness in my eyes, she stopped immediately.

No, not again, she said, and rubbed me dry with a rough towel.

That was yesterday.

This morning I woke up again with the headache. Through the haze in my head I wanted to understand it, the dynamic between us. I can't understand it. It's too difficult for me. I wanted to explain it when the talking-hour struck.

Then something entirely different to what I'd planned came out of me. Because I feel so powerless, so needy, then I attacked her, then I started casting aspersions upon her.

You and the fires of Grootmoedersdrift, Agaat. The fire on the mountain, the fire in the hayloft, was that you?

Accusations have always set her off. And complaints. And criticism. If I can't mollify her, that's the only alternative. I can anger her. And if I can anger her, I can get angry myself. That would be better than nothing.

Who's the arsonist here on the farm? Who's the great setter of fires amongst us?

That hit the mark. All that she could do, was to draw off my pee and get out and turn her backside on me to pick hydrangeas, the ones far down, those that are a bit tousled already with sun and water. The prettiest ones, the strongest, those she's saving. It's a matter of timing.

Blue-purple hydrangeas for my funeral, with the white dahlias and the white Joseph's lilies, nicely rounded off with a little ribbon of crape, I can just see it.

The quarter-hour strikes in the front room. Here comes the preview. In the grey vase. The vase that was not on the clearing-out list. Could still be used at my funeral, I thought to myself. Scenes from coming attractions, as Jak would have said. Not yet quite the demure style of the funeral arrangement. Pretty, lively, informally arranged are the voluptuous blue heads with the yellow privet branches and the bronze-coloured foliage of the prunus nigra, sprays of abelia, orange Cape honeysuckle, a few orange roses. And to round it off, under the base, how else? a few large exuberant bronze leaves of coleus, the plant we call fire-on-the-mountain.

Just look at the hydrangeas, says Agaat, they're flowering as if it's Christmas, I must take cuttings.

She clears a space on the night-table next to me. Her neck is stiff.

Just picture it, is written all over her face, what it will look like on the half-moon table at the front door, there where the guests will be entering. Sincerest condolences, Agaat, it must be a great loss for you. Will that be good enough for you? Or do you think the orange and all the branches are a bit too wild?

If I could I would like to tap the stick of the feather duster on her face. Alphabet of the underworld. Percussion band.

Hands on hips she stands and surveys her handiwork. Well then, Ounooi? Looks as if you want to have a bit of a chat, we have half an hour left.

She takes the duster by the head.

We'll gather lilacs, she sings on an inhaled breath.

A B C D E F G H

I blink H and A and G and swearword on the auxiliary list that's supposed to indicate feeling.

Wow now, says Agaat, which one now?

Y·O·U, exclamation mark, I spell, N·O·O·N·D·A·Y W·I·T·C·H.

Well I never, says Agaat, how's that for a parting shot. What else?

S·A·R·C·A·S·T·I·C, I spell, Y·O·U K·N·O·W W·H·A·T I M·E·A·N.

No, I don't know, says Agaat, you'll just have to spell it out.

F·I·R·E O·N·T. M·O·U·N·T·A·I·N, I spell. I roll my eyes at the flower arrangement.

Yes, doesn't it look pretty with the blue, says Agaat.

If I'm trying to be difficult here on my deathbed, is the message, she'll pretend to think I'm senile.

Can there be a doubler barrel? How do I deal with it?

B·R·O·W·N S·U·I·T·C·A·S·E, I spell.

Where, when, why, question mark, Agaat taps for me on her scraps of paper. They flutter like leaves. I blink Y·E·S Y·E·S exclamation mark.

She puts down the stick. She reformulates my question for me in my own strain, with all my modulations of indignation. And with her own increment of pepper.

What, I ask you for the how-manieth time, happened to your brown suitcase that I put on the half-shelf of the washstand in the outside room, on the day of your birthday, twelfth July in the year of our Lord nineteen sixty, when you moved in there? What happened to all your possessions from the back room? To the pretty dresses that I hung up there for you on the railing behind the curtain, a red and a blue and a yellow one, specially made for you with my highly pregnant body and all? To your first shoes that I had bronzed?

Absolutely right, I blink. How excellently you can guess at the senile thoughts of an old woman. What is your reply to this?

Agaat stands back a little, hands on her stomach. She looks me straight in the eye. The cutting-up of an ox is her reply. Fluently she recites.

Sirloin, cut into flat slices and fried in a pan.

Wing rib, suitable for pot-roasting, bones may also be removed and meat rolled.