Agaat (46 page)

She postpones. Her eyebrows deliberate question marks. Then she scrabbles a quick scratching motion with her fingers, just a little one, an appetiser. She doesn't speak, she only shapes the word ‘itch' with her mouth.

Silent movie. The Itcher and the Scratcher. How many acts tonight?

Need a scratch? ask her lips.

I close my eyes. It means you are an angel of deliverance. It means surrender. She must not remark any further urgency on my part.

The head, asks Agaat, and where else?

She puts her hand under my shoulder.

Here?

Tiny scorpions under a stone.

She pulls out the hand again, rests it on the point of my shoulder.

Three nymphae of the blue tick, their mandibles firmly affixed to my skin.

She puts her hand in the hollow between my breasts.

Small scaly adders in a nest.

Now she touches me with both hands. Lightly, here and there over my strings, over my stops, over my keys. Over my ribs, my belly, my thighs, my ankles, my toes. As if I were a harp. A harp of grass, of chaff and sand fleas and whirling itchy dust.

Everywhere? Is it everywhere?

She puts her hands in her sides. Looks me up and down.

An itch-storm? Ai me. Tsk.

Here comes a hand. It comes towards my head. It scratches, but in an unfocused way.

Harder?

Harder! Everywhere!

Now before we damage something here, Ounooi, let me first see whether you don't have a rash or something.

Agaat opens the curtains. She tarries by the window. How would I know if it's deliberate? Or resigned? Or tired? Or not capable of imagining for one moment longer my need? The spring unsprung at last? She spies on my eyes every day. My need her reins. The steerer and the steered and the bit. In whose mouth is it? It must be like sleeping in someone else's dream. Your own journey abandoned, your own repose an iron in the mouth. You just bite on it. You bite it fast. How she must curse me at times. Cunt. Bugger. But the word in the mouth, a stopper. Under the white standard of the cap a mouth full of bitter teeth.

Where she's standing in front of the window Agaat's strong hand creeps over her shoulder. Just above the white apron band on the right, on the thick flesh of the shoulder blade she scratches herself.

She sighs.

The Great Itch, she says, you and I, each other's itch.

I keep my eyes shut. Is she going to start scratching her own head to provoke me? Is she going to try and talk me out of it? Is she going to ignore it? How beneficent is her mood? Will she ever start a sentence with ‘I feel' or ‘I wish' or ‘I hope'? Is it her itch that is erupting on me? Because she can't speak?

She switches on the lamp next to the bed. She unbuttons the bed-jacket. She eases it down over my abdomen. She takes out the reading glasses from the breast pocket of her apron. Onto her nose she presses them. Shirrt-shurrt she pulls on the latex gloves.

Let's see what's happening here, she says, nobody can just itch like that for no reason.

She looks on both sides of my neck, on my chest. Her eyes are large behind the lenses. She reads my grain. My knots and my flaws. Between the lines.

Excuse me, but I have to inspect all around here a bit now, she says. She avoids my eyes. She takes the magnifying glass out of the dressing table drawer.

She lifts my breasts. She looks under them. She looks in the wrinkles of the skin of my belly. She pulls open my navel and shines the head of the bedside lamp into it. I feel the hook-and-claw feet of a beetle scrabbling in there. Can one go mad from itching? The rose beetle has twenty-five legs and seven antennae.

Permission? Agaat asks with her eyes?

Granted!

The itch blazes on me like a coat of many colours.

She pulls the tunic off my lower body. She scrutinises my loins through her lenses. She folds open my labia.

From where I'm lying, I see her mouth move through the magnifying glass, a vague fleshy hole.

Pure as morning dew, she says.

She comes slightly upright over my lower body, blows on the magnifying glass, polishes it with the tip of her apron.

Impossible are your texts, Agaat. How are you going to explicate me one day? How are you going to explain everything to yourself? Collarbone, knuckle bone, jaw? Will you have a motto for every part of me? Perhaps that's what you're practising for? Perhaps you are now already calling me up. Poltergeist. But ghosts don't itch. That's all that still stands in your way. This last proof of external sensation.

Now she's inspecting my thighs, inside and out, the birthmark in the bend of my knee, the shadows under my knees. Under her magnifying glass the itch fumes a salty mist, like drifts of sand across a dune, my shins, my ankles, two rusty wrecks.

She stacks her towel rolls on either side of me, she tilts me on my side, each touch produces a fresh flush of itchy patches. She is behind me, she examines the rough ridges, the giant sungazer lizard with its spiny girdle sun-gazing on the Trappieshoogte, the aloes, the bitter juice, the rustling mirage.

She tilts me back.

I don't see anything. No redness, no dandruff, no rash, no scaliness, no bumps, no pimples. Not a bedbug in sight, mite-free definitely. Now
tell me, are you still itching?

Agaat, I'm talking to you, look at me, the stars are old. Shall I give you a stone when you ask for bread? Just scratch me a bit for the sake of all the gods!

Very well, but just gently, I think you're imagining things. That's what I think she wants to say, because now her lips have stopped moving.

She goes and puts the magnifying glass back in the drawer, takes off her glasses and replaces them in the top pocket. Shirrrt-shurrrt, she pulls off the gloves. She washes her hands in the washbasin. I smell disinfectant. She dries them. She inspects her nails.

Her eyes look slightly unsure. What proof does she have that I'm not losing my mind? Her mouth is unfathomable.

She pulls the sheet back over my body. She wants to spare me that, spare herself that, the sight of her hands, the big one and the small, scratch-scratching over my naked emaciated body. Perhaps she wants to prevent herself from starting to laugh. Perhaps she wants to prevent herself from starting to tickle me. Perhaps she will all of a sudden want to tickle me. If I can itch I'm still ticklish. Perhaps she's feeling a bit hysterical. Perhaps it hasn't ebbed away yet after the great joke with the neighbour's wife.

I inspect the stirrings under the sheet. I cast the harness of my eyes over the ill-matched pair. The fingers are cautious. She follows the movements of my eyes on her hands. My eyes are her score. She does sight-reading. She plays the keyboard. By touch. Trills. Scales. A chord. The note-perfect rehearsed death I shall be, the virtuoso performed.

Left, right, no, a bit to the top, more, no down more, down, this side, no that side. There! Just there! More! Don't stop. Now up here. No, just next to it. Up! Down!

The clock strikes in the passage. That was a quarter of an hour's scratching. From head to toe and in all the little crannies, in front, behind and along the sides. A partita. Improper tempo. Fantastic execution. Complete relief. Applause! Flowers!

Agaat doesn't want me to thank her. She averts her eyes. She brings ice-cold wet cloths and wipes me with them, she takes a small, rough towel that she's warmed in the oven and rubs my whole body warm with it, she rubs cold handfuls of Lacto Calamine Lotion all over my skin. She waves it dry with an open diary. The pages flutter. A bat, a butterfly, a blue gryphon. She puts on my tunic, fastens it behind my neck. She covers me. She walks out of the room with a straight back.

Itch-free I remain behind.

At long last a bit of a holiday. Really and truly feel I need rest after this year of calamities. J. constantly agitated & full of conspiracy theories about the assassination of Verwoerd. Mother hardly cold in her grave then that on top of it. Haven't really had time to be quiet & also not had much time to write how life does pass & Jakkie's growing up & the old people precede us & you forget the moments that were precious to you.

 

Just yesterday before we left Agaat & I went by Ma's grave to take some flowers & I realised then I didn't really cry all that much in July but if I were to mourn what exactly would it be for? Perhaps that in spite of everything I did after all yearn for her approval? For one spontaneous embrace? Her body forgivingly pressed to mine? So much that now cannot be set straight or talked about. Yes at last liberated from her. But what will I measure myself against now? Now that her judge-mental eye no longer falls on everything I do? It's terrifying in a way.

 

Perhaps I wanted to cry because she died before I could tell her the whole truth about J. But in any case the whole funeral & the gossip that made its way back to me just made me realise anew that honesty & intimacy are not things that are easy to afford. But how do you defend yourself against your own mother? Her directions regarding the funeral felt like a last trial.

 

Fortunately I could count on A. Didn't have to spell out anything for hr. She was a real live wire with the funeral & supervised the cooking for more than a hundred people who had to eat. It was a palaver with seating on the stoep because then it rained a deluge. A whole saga at the drift of course. The coffin duly arrived all the way from Barrydale by horse-drawn cart as Ma had stipulated in her will—in her way also bent on her little portion of drama. So different to Pa who wanted nothing but for his ashes to be scattered on the Tradouw. So there the drift was flooded & the horses balked I suppose also because of the crape funeral coats wet and heavy on them & they refused to cross. So A. left everything just like that in the kitchen & went and helped D. and his team. Unload the coffin and carry it we don't want the ounooi to get washed away in the drift & bring the lip halters she says. They unload the coffin & then the horses rear up & the water splashes & they snort
but she keeps hr side short & Dawid keeps the other side & they all keep their funeral faces solemnly composed & walk shoes & all ever so dignified through the water with Kadys and Julies with his floppy foot shlip-shlop bringing up the rear. So then they loaded the coffin back onto the cart for the last stretch up to the graveyard here next to the old orchard where it then was so wet & muddy that they had to put down planks & sacks for the people to stand on & had to pump the water out of the hole.

 

Heaven knows why one had to take so much trouble over something that in any case is going to waste away to dust in this case to mud because it rained incessantly all year from before June and thereafter. Ma's headstone collapsed twice & as far as we drove yesterday all the way from Skeiding to Port Beaufort the wild fennel was standing hip height on both sides of the road. A. says it's hr trademark. If I were she I'd keep my mouth shut about that I warn her. It's not everybody who likes a taint of liquorice in their cow's milk. She asks for who is the place in the graveyard between the ounooi & the great-great-grandmother?

Flag-raising & Day of the Covenant on the beach today quite moving such a bright blue windless day at the sea. There is no strand so wild or far away but there is found thy name in majesty. The minister prayed for the new leaders who must lead the nation after Dr Verwoerd was so brutally taken from us by the powers of darkness. Jak says Tsafendas is a communist. I say the poor man is mad who in his senses would dream of stabbing the Prime Minister of South Africa to death with a knife in parliament we're not that kind of country. Jak says don't have any illusions this is just the beginning.

 

A. stands firm as a rock next to Jakkie where he's frolicking in the little breakers. Three other nursemaids in the shallows this morning where the toddlers are playing. They tuck their gaudy frocks into the elastic of their bloomers so that they won't get wet—jump and scream when the waves come. They don't talk to hr. She keeps to one side & and she puts on airs with hr black & white clothes the whole holidays so far there've been many opportunities for striking up friendships. Shame A. is alone I say to J. Shouldn't have said it because that caused another spat. He says she's got everything a woolly could wish for & it's better that she keeps herself apart he really doesn't want hassles with a hobnobbing then next thing you have young goffels climbing in & then she
gets that way & then she's lost to us. I tell him that's not the point what worries me is that she's too old & too cold & too high & mighty even to think of young goffels but it's holiday after all & what does she have of her life as a young girl? Have! Have! J. shouts don't even start with have she has everything a coon-girl's heart could desire and furthermore she has Jakkie more than you or I have him or had him or ever will have. Why do you worry about her? Look at him. He doesn't make any friends either he just tags along with Agaat all the time it's not normal.