Agaat (49 page)

Agaat flings a sheet over me. It balloons and flaps over my head.

If Jakkie comes, you have to look your best, she says.

The sheet settles over the bedspreads. She ties the two upper corners with a double knot behind my neck. She pulls it tight from my neck and tucks it in around the mattress. She places the round hand mirror on its stand on the bridge.

He mustn't think that I've just let you lie here and waste away, she says.

The sheet looks like a lampshade, a circus tent.

Plant a pennant in my skull and I'm the main tent, I flicker at Agaat. She flickers back without looking at me, to indicate she sees, but it's sheer bullshit that I'm flickering if even she can't understand it.

My head is the stopper in the hole in the roof-top, I persist, my neck the central pole. In the dome of my forehead glows forty watts. A circus tent full of sawdust, a lantern, a paper bag around a candle, shadows of trapeze artists glide to earth in the spotlight, inside resounds the applause of the crowd.

He must know his little old mother has been in the very best of hands, says Agaat.

She ignores my flickering, not inclined to risk a translation, doesn't even want to start guessing, practical matters first, the hour of the manicure has struck.

She places another towel round my neck, tucks the edges into the top of the neckbrace.

Right, she says, now you're nice and stubble-proof.

Doesn't feel up to another itching episode, that's clear. She slots a tape into the player.
Noonday Witch
, symphonic tone poem by Dvořák. A gift from Jakkie on her last birthday. Not exactly a lullaby, he wrote, but to remind her how she had ‘snatched him from oblivion' on the Tradouw.

Who does she think she's spiting? What's driving her? The end, I imagine. It's the end that's hoving in sight for her. Then people tend to lose their wits. You can afford to fiddle while the drift burns. You start squandering the rations. During the day you ride your horses recklessly through the piss. Because you're almost there. There's a light at the end of the road. It's worse than the Great Trek, this stretch.

Now which hairstyle will it be this time? Agaat asks. Daisy de Melcker? Or Margaret Thatcher?

Very funny, I signal. Circus!

It's curiosity that's driving her. I can see straight through her. Feigned dressage of the half-dead! What's the use? She lies! She's standing outside the tent again peeping through the chinks to steal a glimpse. Of the ringmaster, of the elephant on all fours on a little drum, of the lion lying down before the whip. Of the strong woman lifting a horse. The clown tripping over the bucket. The only difference is that Agaat is no longer the child that she was.

When you can no longer laugh, she says, you might as well give up.

Does she know what she's saying? Give up! As if the logic of struggle and discouragement applied here! It's much simpler. All that needs to happen, is that I must die. And it seems the show must go on till then.

What will be the final number? The tattoo announces it, the spotlight is on the slit. But what emerges from it? Only a procession, everything we've seen before, the lion tamers and the gymnasts and the rubber man and the twins in the barrel, round and round the ring until they vanish through the folded-back flap. Until only the ringmaster remains behind. He lifts his top hat. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Perhaps the clown will trip over his feet one last time. But then it's over. For me at least, not for Agaat.

I smelt it last night, the smoke, apparently the wattle forest caught fire there next to the labourers' cottages, everything is black with soot down there and one house was lost, and the roof of another caved in, she says. Apparently from a spark of their cooking-fire that leapt across, because the drift is dry, everything paper-dry there on the banks.

This morning I heard Dawid talking in the kitchen. Demolish, I heard and build and three extra houses please in the place of the corrugated-iron hovels that have been put up there for the children of Julies, of Kadys.

There was a long silence. It was only Agaat and Dawid there, she'd sent out the other two. At last she spoke, loud and clear so that I could also hear.

One thing at a time, Dawid, she said, you must just make do until after the funeral. Till after the New Year, I'd say. Draw up your plans so
long, work out how many bricks and bags of cement it's going to take, corrugated iron, doors, windows, everything, I'll check it and then I'll see what I can do, but I'm telling you now there are too many of you, I'm not building more than two new houses, in the place of the old ones that are falling to pieces and exactly the same size, but I'm not building extra houses, you can decide amongst yourselves which three of the six and their families will go, we're never going to need all of them and I can in any case not carry on paying them all and I don't like unpaid hungry labourers sitting around here getting up to no good and stealing my sheep. And those who stay on, they must stop breeding or I'll have the women fixed, sooner rather than later. Everything is going to get smaller here now, that you've known for more than a year now, if I need people for big jobs, I'll hire kaffirs on contract, as at shearing time, it's much simpler and cheaper too, all the farmers are doing it like that now. They come, they work, they eat, they sleep on sacks in the shed and I pay them and their boss comes and fetches them. No drunken brawls, no stabbings, no loafing around and no babies that I have to catch and that get ill and that I have to doctor and keep healthy all their lives.

Dawid didn't talk back. There was a silence and then the slamming of the screen door.

Is that what's bringing out her nastiness? The new order?

Snip, Agaat cuts with the sharp-pointed scissors in the air, snip, snip, while she regards me from all sides. She pretends to restrict her gaze to my surface, to the wet strands of hair plastered straight against my scalp, up against the tent around my neck. She pretends that everything about me is purely a matter of layout and systematic attack.

But actually she's looking for a peephole. She wants to see what I think of her latest installations here in the room. Straight into me she wants to peer, direct, as if there were a silver screen behind my eyelids full of moving images that could provide her with a truer, more intimate version of my reaction. As if I could contain any secrets that she doesn't know.

She has carried everything she could think of into my room and covered the walls with it.

Only not the maps.

Why should she at this stage want to disregard the maps? From the day that I've been lying here and can no longer move around in a wheelchair, I've been hearing the door of the sideboard open. Tchick, open, tchick, closed. One of the imbuia pieces from my mother still, just like the dressing table here in the bedroom. With the powerful little magnets
and the copper lips on the inside of the catches. Tchick. A seamlessly solid and impenetrable object, with its heavy undulating edge on top and scalloped fringe below. Congealed on ball-and-claw feet. Squatting. Full of dangling little copper handles and festoons. Like an old-fashioned American negress in the
National Geographic
. With many gold rings, earrings and nose-rings. Hunkering. Tchick, open, and after a while, tchick, closed. Then I knew Agaat had selected herself another blue booklet, to come and deposit here with me for the time being. With an announcement of the title that she had thought up herself, a foretaste of the evening's reading. Not backward at all in getting good mileage out of it. Now the books from two little parcels are lying here with dog-eared pages and I hear the same old stories ad nauseam. Where are the rest? Surely there was a third parcel?

Other than that there are only the photo albums in the sideboard, the title deeds of the farm, my marriage certificate. What else? In a little suitcase, all Jakkie's school reports and cuttings of his school concerts. His degree certificates and medals he removed and took away with him when he left that morning in '85. And then a few pieces of silver and old porcelain from my mother's house. A little set of Woodstock glasses. The coffee set with the desert scenes. Agaat knows it will be hers one day. Soon. In a few days. And the napkins that she embroidered with white gardenias for my fiftieth birthday meal. Too pretty to use. The golden year. 1976. Cape gardenias while the country was going up in flames. In two years' time she will be fifty herself. Perhaps she'll start using them then. With whom would she ever in any case sit down to such an elegant table?

Perhaps with Jakkie if he comes. Perhaps she will herself, of her own accord, set a place for herself at the table with him. Perhaps not, perhaps that's my dream for her, more probably he will have to make her sit with him, a meal for two when everything is over, before he returns. And she will sit down and pretend to eat.

Would it really be for Jakkie that she now all of a sudden wants to tidy me up? Or does she want to take it out on me that he still hasn't let her know when he'll be coming? Or has he? Tomorrow perhaps? Eye-wash! This hair-cutting has nothing to do with anybody else. It's just she who wants to get at me.

First she washed my hair. She dropped the back railing of the bed, released the brake and rolled it away from the wall. She brought up the small trolley. I could lie back with my head in the washbasin with the neck-support. She massaged my scalp, shampooed with anti-dandruff tar shampoo, rubbed in conditioner, rinsed three times, rubbed dry.
Special treatment. An ultra-thorough itch-repellent delivery. Energetic too. Where she gets it from.

It can't be from absent-mindedness that she doesn't want to fetch the maps. She will remember them, she had to unpack the whole sideboard that day to fit in the fat roll of maps from Jak's office in the back. I remember I found her there on her knees in the sitting room surrounded by all the stuff with the blue booklets tied with string on her lap. So what is this then? she asked. As if she wouldn't have remembered.

Just old stuff, I said. Throw it out, it just takes up space.

I could see she had other ideas. Her jaw betrayed her. But she said nothing.

With the last clearing-out, when I was half paralysed already, the diaries put in another appearance. The string on two of the packets had fallen off. I was sitting in the Redman Chief next to her with the Royal Reacher. I could still pick up or move the odd thing here and there. I manoeuvred the blue booklets aside, the third pile that was still tied up.

Onto the bonfire with that, I said. Take a little suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the passage and pack all Jakkie's things neatly in that, he'll want them one day. One day he'll want to see again what his teachers wrote there, his first composition book, his first swimming and rowing diplomas.

Suddenly I remember the whole hullabaloo. She made everything tumble down from the passage cupboard in searching for the right size of suitcase, small enough to fit into the sideboard, large enough for Jakkie's things. It sounded as if she was kicking around the suitcases there in the passage.

The house has always spoken up when Agaat has taken a vow of silence. When could she have gone to replace the blue booklets in the sideboard? And how long ago did she start reading the first two packets? Just wasn't up to the first little lot? 1953 to 1960, it's written on the cover, the dates. That was how I divided them up when I tied them that time.

I could hear from the way in which she pulled up the railing of the bed's head again that I was going to be subjected to more than hair-washing. That it was only the start.

Now she wants to manicure the whole imminent carcase. The full treatment. Everything has been set out neatly in a line. Pumice stone, nail scissors, files coarse and fine, razor, magnifying glass, tweezers. As if the cutting and plucking and shaving and filing will reveal something of my inner being. As if relieved of unwanted hair and nails and
calluses, my shell will become transparent so that she can see my inner workings.

What does she think it will consist of? Gears, ratchets, cogs? A central axle driving everything? A little black humming box in which the motor is housed? A film on a reel, conducted through all the channels and grooves and spools? That's where she wants to end up, at the still frames, to see what I think of her resistance, to find out what more I want, to see why on earth I carry on whingeing like that. Preferably she would want to dismantle me, unscrew all my components.