Agaat (36 page)

Because her arms are tired. I can feel how she struggles when she has to turn me, lift my legs, my hands.

Her feet are sore, I can hear she walks with difficulty. She's burnt out.

How valiant was she not at the start, in those early days when we had just heard what was wrong with me. Fired with enthusiasm even. She thought she would handle it, as she had handled all illness and death in her life.

She was upset that I wouldn't take her with me to Cape Town, alarmed when I came back after a week.

Leroux came to fetch me and brought me back again. I pretended to be sleeping in the car. I didn't want to listen to his chatter. I thought of Agaat, how I was to convey it to her. A few times I felt the wind buffet the car, heard him swear, felt the car swerve as he corrected. It was a
wild wind typical of the change of season and it raged all the way from Groote Schuur to The Spout. When we got out in the yard I could see the willows by the dam being blown to one side. I could smell the fennel, sharp as always when the wind blew just before the rains.

12 May 1993 it was. A Wednesday afternoon. Agaat served tea and rusks in the sitting room.

In her eyes the full orchestra was playing.

So here you are again! Alive and kicking! Pure affectation! Didn't I tell you! Or what am I saying? Let's have it! If there's more to know, I want to know it! Now! This minute! Winter pains? Frozen shoulder?

I shuttered my regard, answered cautiously, later-later-clear-out-now.

It was what he'd suspected all along, said Leroux and added milk to his tea.

Not hypochondria. Not this time.

Small smile, quickly wiped away. In front of him lay the papers with the results of the tests.

I must plan, he said.

One and a bit of sugar.

I must make provision.

Doctor Stir-well.

I must start formulating a living will.

Doctor Dunk-a-rusk.

You're never done with such a testament. You can always change it again. In the end it really only has to state in black and white what must happen one day when you can no longer change anything yourself.

T chirr-tchirr, the creeper against the pane.

Who must do it then . . .

Picks a crumb out of the tea.

Who may change something then . . .

I heard a dog's bark downwind blow away right out of its mouth.

Who may change something on your behalf . . . take decisions on your behalf . . . now do I understand what he means?

Ticks, with the teaspoon in the saucer.

I must consider it well, I have enough time, he said. Three years, maybe five in my case. I must realise he himself does after all think very progressively about these matters, he always wants only to alleviate all and any suffering as much as possible and he is at my service I need only speak the word, do I understand?

As far as possible. Alleviate he wants to.

Up-and-down with his eyebrows. Read-me-I'm-an-open-book-my-name-is-Euthanasia-Leroux-MB Ch.B.

Well, in my book there's little scope for speculation, Doc. I was born Redelinghuys, house of reason.

I beg your pardon?

I said, time will tell.

I wanted him to leave. Agaat was listening from behind the kitchen door. I could hear the floorboards creak. She had taken a dislike to the man from early on, could imitate his would-be fatherly blanditudes to a nicety.

At the front door he pressed a transparent blue plastic case full of blue and red pamphlets and brochures into my hands, also a book on all kinds of atrophies and publicity magazines on appliances, and folded my thumbs around the handle for me.

Do take well-informed decisions now, Mrs de Wet, he said, fortunately I know you are of a practical bent, somebody who wants to be in control at all times. And you are a farmer. Illnesses and suffering are a farmer's daily bread. And fortunately you have no dependants at this stage who could hamper you . . . er . . . whom you have to concern yourself about.

The self-correction was half lost in the thunderous bang of the back door.

Grootmoedersdrift is situated in a draught. That was what we always said to one another at that time of year.

And wait, he said, it almost slipped my mind.

Three paces and he was next to his car. A big white plastic bag appeared.

On appro, he said, the newest appliances on the market, I thought I would do some shopping for you in the meantime while I was in town. Try them out, see what works, we can settle later.

He pressed the bag into my arms on top of the case.

A sheet of paper fluttered to the ground, he snatched it up and stuck it on my chest on top of everything else.

Oh, and then there's this table, the whole profile at a glance, he said, symptoms, medicine, therapy.

Bedside manner in the Overberg, I thought, physician heal thyself.

And as he drove out at the gate, I thought: Milla has all of it.

Only now do I realise what I was trying to think that day. Because now I almost have it all behind me.

To make of nothing an all.

That was what Agaat made of me. The lamer, the more nothing I became, the more she put into me. I never had any defence. It was her initiative. To make me a lucky packet of myself. The person who has to
wither so that the book of her life can be filled. As in like manner the great God had to shrink to make room for his creation. Or something to that effect. Even now I still can't quite get a clean grip on the idea. It's a sort of sum with varying balances but with retention of all the contents, only distributed in very specific packagings.

I went to lie down on my bed until Agaat rang the bell for supper. She had cooked specially to celebrate my return: Lamb pie, green beans with onion and bacon, stewed peaches, potatoes, boiled, floury as I like them, a ripe red tomato salad with onions. Damask. Candles. Flowers.

Welcome home.

Even a bottle of wine from the cellar.

Eat, she said, it will give you strength.

She served me, poured wine for me. The meat in the pie was finer than usual, so that I didn't have to cut it. I was hungry. I was melancholy with feeling what hunger felt like. I wiped my eyes with my napkin. She pretended not to see it. While I was eating, she talked softly, gave me an edited-for-the-sickbed version of what had been happening on the farm in the meantime. She made me at home in my room afterwards. Hot-water bottle, new bedsocks, softest wool, look, I knitted them for you while you were away. Waited for me to speak, pleaded with the eyes, please, I'm Agaat, I'm here, with you, speak to me, tell me what is happening.

Another time, I indicated with my hand.

She switched off the light.

Sleep, she said in the dark in my direction, then you'll feel better.

Later I became aware of a murmuring and got up to go and see. I listened in the passage. It was her voice.

Dys-pha-gia, can't swallow, dys-ar-thria, can't talk, sia-lor-rhoea, incessant drooling.

She was sounding the words. I peeped through the chink of the kitchen door. The plastic case and the white bag had been unpacked. Papers and brochures were spread out on the kitchen table. Agaat was studying my illness over her supper. On her hands were two grey palm socks to which a clumsy knife and a fork with three prongs had been fixed.

Spas-ti-ci-ty, she read on the table next to her plate, wrist pains, cramps, spasms, as-piration, depression.

Slowly she spelled out the big words: Movement spec-trum exercise. Mo-di-fied food con-sis-ten-cy.

And in the same breath she said, I've finished eating, you can come out now from behind the door, we might as well get to work on this, you and I.

You and I. Indeed. We're still getting to work, if work is what one can call what has been happening in this room the past few months.

One could have decided not even to get started on it.

Because it would be too much.

I would have had to settle it on my own while I could still move, that's what. Short and sweet. But I procrastinated every time. Just this first, just that first, must first clear up, first get my life in order before I put an end to it one day neatly tied up with a string. But I couldn't.

I left the decision to her.

Euthanasia isn't something that she can even consult me on any more.

Such a possibility doesn't appear on her list.

How would she in any case have to formulate it?

Must I put an end to you?

Are you ready?

How do you want me to prepare you?

Or must I overpower you unexpectedly?

Do you want to know how I'm going to do it?

Do you want to choose the method yourself?

A pillow over your head? A drink? A pill? A crowbar? A knife?

She'll never be able to say it. She chose the strait and narrow. Simply doing from hour to hour what was given to her hand to do. First things first, one thing at a time, according to a plan. As if it made sense, as if it held promise.

Why does she ignite the little bit of hope in me every day? Hope of a turn, a way out, a satisfactory conclusion, of which you could say with certainty that it was good?

I find that on some days I long for it more than on other days.

I heard the phone ringing early this morning. It was Leroux.

She was short with him.

Perhaps he had been hopeful. Because, no, she said, she's still with us, and well. Well, well, well. I understand. I'll do that. Right. Goodbye doctor. Yes, doctor. No, doctor. Goodbye.

And now she thinks I'm sleeping again after drinking my thick sweet tea with the bit of chilli powder that she believes is good for me. I heard her send the servants home. She wiped my face quickly this morning and beyond that did not touch me, as if she were suddenly scared that I might fall apart. I tried to reassure her.

Thank you, I feel better after the phlegm is out, lighter, I breathe more easily.

But she avoided my eyes, didn't want to help me speak, knew it was just to comfort her.

I can't help her.

Twice already I've heard her pick up the receiver and put it down again. She wants to phone. I wait. What does Agaat want to say? Whom does she want to phone?

She phones often, the chemist, the co-op, the shop. Orders things, organises things. And people phone here and she speaks to them and tells them, according to who is phoning, more or less. Rather less, more less, less and less. Platitudes. Truisms. The chickens are laying well, the harvest is almost in, her feet are cold sometimes. When she says that, they ring off quickly. People don't want to hear about my ever more chilly feet.

If it's Jakkie, she speaks loudly on purpose, repeats everything he says. About his research amongst primitive tribes, his travels. He gets to all of Africa, it seems, just not South Africa. Here he apparently only wants fieldworkers. Agents it sounds like, who listen to songs and send them on to him. To then be preserved in the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology. It seems to her Americans have money to waste, says Agaat.

Jakkie.

Sometimes I think she makes it up, that he rings, that he asks after me, that he says he will come.

But how would I know?

My child the great absence.

What he inherited from me and Jak is definitely recognisable. Slightly melancholy, sometimes quite sharp with his tongue. Agaat one hears most clearly in him. The sayings, the songs, the rhymes, in which he has an obsessive interest. Sometimes she sings something on the phone for him if he can't remember the words any more.

The bottom of the bottle.

The Sunday morning.

Ai, the ordinary little old songs, and then he did have such a beautiful voice, the child. Would it be him that she wants to ring? A last chance to come?

When he wrote to say he was starting to study all over again, I wrote back saying but surely there's a department of Afrikaans cultural history at Stellenbosch, isn't there? And then in his next letter he delivered himself of a whole lot of stuff about how he wasn't a Patriomanic Oxwagonologist, but an anthropologist, and that meant that it was the rubbish bins of the worthy professorial Brethren of Stellenbosch, not their ideas, that he had to scrutinise under a magnifying glass. The ideas, he wrote, spoke for themselves, they flared to high heaven like pillars of fire in the desert, they couldn't be missed by a deaf-and-dumb dog with a blocked nose.

It upset me, that the child could now turn so sharply against his own people. Being radical surely didn't oblige you to become disrespectful. It wouldn't have been wise of me to react at that stage. Those were his refractory years. Not that he ever fitted in altogether. Even as a child always half-apart, never really interested in his peers, tied to Agaat's apron strings here on the farm. Later, too, not much time or taste for the antics of his fellow-students or for the other officers in the Defence Force. Herd animals, he said, always had to have a bell-wether and a scapegoat, without those they couldn't function.

Nowadays he sounds more concerned. Not about the headline news, he writes, but about ‘the little grey bushes', whatever that's supposed to mean. Surely one can't live with so little faith in the world?

He writes but rarely. When he writes to Agaat, she no longer shows it to me. Not that she ever really showed his letters, she just read out from them, quoted what she wanted to.

There was just the one letter, the one that she had to show us, Jak and me, the first one after he vanished. Of that I saw only the first line. And when I saw it again, it was so besmeared with blood that the pages were stuck together.

She would supposedly still read it to me. Nothing came of that. More than a year later only did Jakkie report on everything. Rather synoptically. No reference to that first confession and plea.