Agaat (13 page)

At night I don't hear her stir. She sleeps like a ramrod on that bier. I can see it before me. On her back with the hands on the chest. The sleep of the vigilant. Twice a night, once before midnight and once after, she comes and stands by my bed in the dark on bare feet. She is not officially awake. Nor am I, I pretend to be asleep. Sometimes of late she then goes out at the back and stays away for an hour or longer.

I don't hear her go into the back room. Where on earth would she roam?

There's the first stirring now. The stretcher creaks as she stretches to reach the switch of the passage light. She takes one gulp of water from her mug. The enamel krrts on the floor as she sets it down. Another creak as she swings her legs off the little bed. A swish as she puts on her housecoat over her nightdress. A squeak and a bang as she folds the stretcher, a shuffling as she slides it into the second broom-cupboard next to the bathroom.

She walks down the passage. Thud, thud, thud, go her bare feet on the boards. She unlocks the kitchen door, talks to the dogs, closes the lower door behind her again. The screen door squeaks, the screen door slams, seven paces, the outside room's door is opened, the lock, the bolt, the lower door that scuffs on the linoleum. Washing and dressing is what she's going to do. Use the bathroom in the house, I try to get through to her, but she pretends not to understand me.

Koffie and Boela make whimpering sounds. I hear them paw the lower door of the kitchen. She no longer allows them in my room. On Leroux's advice, she says.

I don't believe her. From the day that she started to read from the booklets, she forbade them here. As if she wanted to be the dog herself.

She cannot abide to see other life in my room.

Just as little as she can abide the idea of moving into the guest bedroom and to stay in the house decently with me. Why not? There's more than enough space here, I gesture, but there's no getting her to understand.

I miss the dogs. Always when they came galloping in here, I felt as if I was still somebody's owner. First with the front paws on the bed's edge, wet muzzles pressed in under my hands, smell of dog bodies in my nose, laughing mouths and panting breaths, a whole warm brown fur-covered life here over my white covers. With their wag-tails they whisked the air into life here in the room in the mornings. After a while they would calm down and settle on the little mat by the glass door next to Agaat's chair, and I would look at how their eyebrows twitched as they watched me for a while and how they at length would sigh and go to sleep. I could watch them like that until they started dreaming, till the hind legs started kick-kicking, and the little muscle started twitching in the forepaw and the lip started quivering with a muted growl. Chasing rabbits.

Now it's only Agaat's chair there in front of the glass door. There she sits and embroiders during the day if she has time, if she feels well-disposed towards me, and in the evenings until I fall asleep.

It's a big cloth. She's been working at it ever since I've not been able to move, all of eleven months. Started it a long time ago, it seems, because
one side had already been thoroughly worked when she brought it in here the first time. I often signal with my eyes, let's have a look, but she pretends not to see. Now the first light darts through the chink in the curtain onto the embroidered cloth where she put it down on her chair. The decoration is dense and thick in white satin thread, an intricate combination of drawn stitch and shadow stitch. If I focus in a certain way, the strip on which the light falls looks like a band of white marble with convoluted detail sculpted in low relief.

She's made great strides with the embroidery, Agaat, she'd by now be able to add a few chapters to the embroidery book.

Quarter past five, it chimes. She's back in the kitchen where she put the kettle on on her way out, so that now she only has to add boiling water to the bag and the thickening agent. Here she is coming down the passage. First tray, set out last night, second quarter-hour of the day. Tea. Morning medicine.

With her smell of Lifebuoy and Mum and calamine she enters the room.

Praise the Lord, rise up rejoicing, she sings. She stops when she sees I'm already awake.

Her uniform crackles. Her cap shines like a beacon. She is wearing a clean white housecoat with short sleeves, over that a white crocheted jersey. I can smell the cold-water Omo. The apron is stiff with starch. Her rubber soles sough as she tacks about my bed.

She cranks me up, she pummels my pillows, she hoists my neck out of my body, she props up my head, she arrays me.

Wake and shake, make and take, she says.

She comes with a wet lukewarm sponge and wipes out my mouth.

Mole from the mouth, she says.

She unfastens the nappy between my legs, puts it aside in a bundle and slides the number one pan in under me.

She puts on my bib.

She clamps the jug with the long spout and the little tube to the railing of the bed. She bends the drip-stem with the mouthpiece so that it's suspended above my lips. She adjusts the drip-hole. She puts the mouthpiece into my mouth.

Ten counts between each swallow, she says. Ready steady go!

She eases open the valve. The first drop of warm thickened liquid spreads over my tongue. Rooibos. One mouthful tea and one mouthful breath and count to ten, says Agaat, think of the undrprvlgd.

A mouthful of consonants. Lest I forget what I wrote.

I do my best. Half runs down my chin.

She watches me closely while she prepares everything. She tucks the bib in further under my chin. She wipes my chin. I get hold of the rhythm. I am thirsty. I count to ten. I swallow. I count ten tens and ingest ten mouthfuls, a quarter-mouth at a time. This cup.

Agaat fills the plastic basin with hot water from the kettle that she's brought with her from the kitchen. She arranges the towels, the washcloths, the soap and the sponges, everything neatly on the large hospital trolley that Leroux carted in here.

I drink three more tens.

Drinking merrily she is this morning, says Agaat. Have you peed yet, Ounooi?

I signal, no, you can see for yourself the nappy is dry. She doesn't look.

I'm asking, have you peed yet?

Now she looks. I signal again no, I have not and don't be so crude so early in the morning.

Well go on pee, Ounooi, I haven't got all day.

Don't look at me, I gesture, look in the other direction.

Agaat makes little whistling sounds between her teeth to encourage me.

It won't come.

I hear nothing, she says. She puts her hand behind her ear.

Is the little tap stuck this morning, hmmm? Well, perhaps you can't drink and pee at the same time. Let's close the tap up here, then maybe the one down there will open.

She keeps her face straight. She closes the tea drip and takes the spout out of my mouth. Her rubber soles suck noisily at the floor, it sounds as if there's extra torque, extra weight in her tread. I recognise it. That's what she does when she discovers she can't make me. She turns her back on me. I know what she's going to do. She swirls the water around in the washbasin. She wrings out the cloth to make it drip in the water. Still nothing. I know she's listening. Her ears point backwards. She takes a glass, she pours the water, over and over, from a height.

I try to think of something else. My bladder is full. I want to. I didn't want to in the nappy, else there would have been all manner of commentary. And I don't want to make extra problems, I don't want to distract her.

Pee and tea is not the problem. Agaat is the problem. She acts stupid. It's been five days now that I've been gesturing there is something, there in the front of the house, in the sideboard, in the front room, with the photo albums.

She doesn't like the idea that I want to take leave. Perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone. Perhaps telepathy works better through piss in the pan than transmitted in waves through the air into the rock-hard skull of Agaat.

Streams of grace abounding, Agaat sings, flow from God above, sacred source of freshness, that was pledged by His love.

I think of the water map. I think of the underground water-chambers in the mountain, of the veins branching from them, of the springs in the kloofs, of the fountains of Grootmoedersdrift, the waterfalls in the crevices. I think of the drift when it's in flood, the foaming mass of water, the drift in the rain, when the drops drip silver ringlets on the dark water. And just after it's cleared, when the black-wattle branches sag heavy and sodden over the ditch and the frogs clamour in the drenched grass-thickets on the bank. Memories in me and I awash between heaven and earth. What is fixed and where? What real? If only I could once again see the places marked on the map, the red brackets denoting gates, cattle-grids, sluices, the red is-equal-to sign of the bridge over the drift, first and last gateway over which the livestock of Grootmoedersdrift move and will continue moving when I am gone. Sheep, cattle, cars, lorries, wire cars, mud and time. Slippery, supple, subtle, silvery time.

Maps attend lifetimes. What is an age without maps? I see it, chambers full of idle melancholy cartographers in the timeless hereafter. Hills there surely will have to be in heaven, but eternal, Eternal Humpbacked Hills, and Eternal Fairweather. Idle melancholy meteorologists. What is a real human being? A run-off. A chute of minutes for God the sluicer. He who paves his guttering with people.

Perhaps I've been infected by Agaat. She's blasphemed for a long time.

It's coming. Here it comes, through my blessed piss-sphincter, first passing of the day.

Good girl, says Agaat. You don't perhaps want the number two pan as well, seeing that you're in the swing of things now? Lesson six, remember? You don't want dung and piss all over everything if you can help it.

Quite right, I flicker, but I'm not a slaughter animal.

She flickers back.

Otherwise we'll have no choice but to dose you with a Pink Lady again, she says, a Pink Lady for the lady of Gdrift, it's five days now that her guts have been stuck. Perhaps that's what's making her so restless. What goes in must come out, after all, good heavens!

Take away the pan, I gesture.

No, you first drip-dry nicely now. Then we fix up your uppers first.

It's a quarter-body wash this morning. Half-wash is every second day and full wash every fourth day. A lick and a promise, Agaat calls the quarter-wash.

She wipes my neck and face with a lukewarm cloth. Then my chest. She works in the cloth under my hospital gown, over my shoulders. She brushes my hair with a dry shampoo. She supports my head with the little hand, so that it doesn't loll or roll. She rubs cream on my face and ointment in the corners of my mouth. Now the neckbrace. Krrts, karrrts, she rips loose and refastens the Velcro until it's seated properly. It expands all the time. My neck feels loose.

She brings the hand mirror closer. I close my eyes. Take away your mirror. We haven't looked in the mirror for a long time. I recognise the mood. She wants to torment me. She's quite capable of digging up the lipstick and mascara from somewhere again.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, says Agaat, who's the fairest of them all?

I keep my eyes shut. My face flushes hot with defying her. I refuse to look, I wait until she moves away. I hear her adding water to the washbasin. She pulls out the pan from under me. I hear her walk away with it. I peep from the corner of my eye to see what she's doing. She puts on her glasses, examines the contents in front of the window. She puts it down on the trestle table, covers it with a cloth. She writes on the calendar with the pencil suspended there on a string, Leroux's urine record that he wants to see every time he visits me. My logbook. The motions of my entrances and my exits. Today Agaat looks into the pan again and again as if it contained a message. She takes her magnifying glass out of the dressing table drawer. She peers through it and she writes and she looks again. Augur of my elements, who will prevent her from prognosticating my piss? Perhaps it contains tadpoles.

Quite satisfactory under the circumstances, says Agaat, a slight little cloudiness, but nothing to fret about.

She pages the calendar back, taps on it once before she replaces it in the hole for November. She replaces the magnifying glass in the drawer. Ting, go the dressing table's swing-handles as she slams shut the drawer with her thigh. She knows I'm peeping at her.

She throws off my covers. She wrings out the washcloth, gives me one quick wipe between the legs. It's too hot. She knows very well it's too hot.

I keep my eyes shut.

Pees like a mare, says Agaat, nothing wrong with the pee.

I wait for her to cover me again, I'm cold.

She waits for me to take the bait.

A pretty light yellow. Clear except for the little trail. And not at all over-sharp on the nose, she says, just about perfect pee.

What can I reply to that? What acrobatics of eyelids to convey: Your sarcasm is wasted on me. If I could die to deliver you, I would do so, today. Go and find somebody else to pee perfection for you on command. You're the one who wants to be perfect. You want me to be perfect. We must not be lacking in any respect. If you can do without, I must be able to do without, that's what you think.

A perfect nurse. A perfect patient.

As I taught you.

According to the book.

What more can anybody expect? you think. And what sticks in your gullet is my surplus neediness, and that you no longer know who I am, and that I've changed, that I'm still, every day that I lie here, changing. And that I require something specific from you.

I open my eyes. She's standing next to my bed with one hand folded into the other.