Agaat (55 page)

I have seen enough, heard enough of this procession. What must I still know or try to understand here? What is the message of the moribund air in this vault? Or is this how the sheet of a last summer rests on one, a white drift blown backward from the comb of the wave? As if it wants to tie the wave back into the body of the sea, so that its breaking is aborted, begrudging the final spuming, rushing foam?

Unfathomable that which still weighs on me here. A warmth on my cheek at times, on my forehead, on my stomach, on my ankles, a hand that hovers above me with the weight of a longing, longing to pluck a string, to touch the shady side of a stone. As a stone would feel it, I imagine I feel it, the subtle longings, longings of a mountain wind, or a wind-blown seed, of a stray drop or a tiny lizard, of a blade of grass
leaning against me. To what do they seek to edify me, these delicate bodies that waver around me? To what do they seek to move me when they measure their insignificance against mine, sink their all-but-insensible weight into my weight?

At times it is something that vibrates on my breastbone as if the stick of a toy fan has been planted there. At times, late at night, it becomes a flagstaff in a high wind, and I hear a rope knocking against the pole.

When I feel something pressing on me, so, then I know I'm still alive.

My skin presses on me, an underfelt, a rain-wet canvas. My skin torments me. My skin wants to fashion from my flesh another layer, a last pressing of itself. For what purpose? Why does my body begrudge itself its own closure?

What more do I have to learn about all my redundant parts? What am I to understand from my skin that rejects me? My skin is shedding me instead of the other way round. My skin is one jump ahead of me.

What lesson is contained in this reluctant diminution?

As if the helplessness on its own were not instructive enough.

I've had enough. I want to become light now, harmless, manifold like seeds of the thistle, I want to drift from myself, blown away from the stalk, floating.

Dust. Wind. Ash. Why is it denied me for so long? Desiccation should run a swifter course. Dishevelment should be more untrammelled. For whose sake must I endure it, this last coherence? The trivial weight, the barren bits of friction, of sheet on body, of head on pillow, of upper lid against lower, of eyeball in socket?

As if it's conceivable that of a whole concert only this would remain to listen to: The siffling of the sleeves encircling the wrists of the musicians, the creaking of the chairs on which they sit, the heaving of their breathing with the up and the down stroke of the bow, the riffling of the pages of the score. Only that, without the music. Harmless negative music, the soil without the cultivation.

A suite of last breaths I am. Solo breath with a dying fall. My breath weighs on me. Expelled it comes to rest on my chest and my chest refuses to rise again. My breath is lead, the opposite of what breath should be. I shed my lead from me, layer by layer.

If it is an art, then, of surrendering myself to weight, let it be heavy enough, dead weight, under which I am planished. Why still this margin of tolerance? Why this subtle pressure and chafing and surging about which I have to wonder, in which there is still warmth and something, a shadow of music, a light pulse billowing in my feet?

Can feet breathe? What then do I feel like a lung there under the arch of my foot? Is that how it begins when it begins? An inspiration from below? Something that lightens the heels?

Who will soothe my feet for me? Who could think up something like that on this rounded earth? Such a light nuzzling nudging together my ankles? Such a sweet weight breathing up against me? A cat, perhaps? A puppy, a hedgehog that Agaat has brought here to lie on my bed with me?

I open my eyes. It is she herself, it is Agaat sleeping at my feet.

She is lying with her head turned aside on her strong arm, the little thin arm is drooped over my ankles, the hand inside the sleeve all the way to the fingertips. My feet are lying against her chest, as if she'd gathered them there to hold them, like a child going to bed with a teddy-bear. To one side on the bed one of the Croxley booklets is lying open. I can make out the black ink, blots still from my old fountain pen. How many more? This is the last of the second packet if I remember rightly, and was there another packet? Were there three?

Why would Agaat have come to read her daily ration at my bed's foot today? Generally it is declaimed from the wheelchair, or from behind the walking frame. Not in the least a bedtime story. Rather to keep me awake. Now we have both slept. Now I have caught her out. In all the months that I've been lying here, this is the very first time.

Agaat's glasses are perched at an angle on her nose. Her mouth is slightly open. Her lower lip gleams. Her breath comes thick from her throat. The sleep of a person who is tired unto death. The late afternoon sun slants a band of light through the curtains. There are shadows in the corners of the room. The coats and hats on the hatstand, the pictures and cloths against the wall, an agricultural show before the opening prayer.

I hear sparrows. It must be evening already. A busy time of day.

Milk. Cream. Eggs.

Irrigation, dogfood, chickenfeed.

The opening of the doors, the pushing up of the sashes to air the house in the cool of evening.

Supper.

But it's a lapsed agenda.

Vaguely I can hear the clanking of cans, voices, a honking of geese coming to the dam, the door of the store being rolled open, the bakkie being pulled in.

Could I be dreaming it all? Is this thin distillation of yard noises the soundtrack of a dream? This golden radiance in the room, is it already
the light of another order? My sleeping nurse, could her slumbering be a sign that I'm trapped with her in a bell-jar of oblivion?

The strips of sunlight shrink back from the walls, crawl down over the foot of the bed. They catch Agaat's cap from the side, from behind and from the front. I can make out the embroidery distinctly. From the back it is darkly lit in silhouette, and from the front etched in relief. Negative and positive simultaneously.

The cap's starched point casts a long rippling shadow on the pleats of the bedspread. Like a horn it looks. Or like the shadow of an old stringy snakeskin, semi-transparent in spots with the elongated shadow-patterns of the weft visible here and there.

White on white the cap is embroidered, in places studded with densely worked stitches. Only when the light falls on it as now, can you see the almost jewel-like contrivance. Now in this late-afternoon light it appears as if inscribed with a confusion of shadow-loops and lines.

Nobody, nobody except Jakkie when he was small, was allowed to look at it straight on. Over the years ever more forbidden, that zone above Agaat's forehead. When she caught me out staring, she made me feel as if I were peeking through a transparent blouse.

But now she is asleep and I can stare to my heart's content. The light plays over the riffles and stipples and eyelets and crenellations of the embroidery. The edges of the cap are bordered above and below with a satin fillet and finished with crocheted lacework. Are my eyes playing me tricks here? A design of musical notation I see, notes and keys and staves. As the light quickens and dims through the trellis on the stoep, through the panels of the glass door, through the gauze lining of the curtain, I can make out what is embroidered there. Am I seeing straight? A harp it seems to be, a syrinx, a tambourine, a trumpet, the neck of a lute. And hands I see, all the wrists bent, all fingers on strings and valves and stops.

Agaat stirs. She closes her mouth, she swallows. She feels my gaze. I must close my eyes before she wakes up. I can't stand it any longer, the fencing with the eyes.

But I can't stop looking. It's like looking into clouds. Everything is possible. Wings it looks like, angels' wings. They arch out gracefully from the backs of the musicians. But the trumpet-player has a pig's snout. And the beak of the harpist is that of a bat. A wolf, grinning, beats the tambourine. A baboon with balloon-cheeks blows the syrinx, a rat with tiny teeth hangs drooling over the lute.

Agaat opens her eyes. Sleepily. She doesn't know where she is. She blinks. Embarrassment steals over her face. The embarrassment is shed.
Defensiveness takes its place. Confusion over her arm around my feet.

Never mind. You were tired. Good thing that you could rest. Never mind, it's not serious. Calmly now. Give yourself time to wake up properly. There's nothing to rush us.

But she's angry. With herself. Angry that I saw her like that, angry that she's late with everything. That evening arrived without her. She sits up straight, adjusts her glasses, adjusts her cap.

Don't be angry. I saw nothing, I've also slept, I woke with you. We dreamt. All that I saw was a dream. See, I'm closing my eyes.

I can feel her distrust. Beneath the distrust, something else. Can it be true? I feel her withdraw. My feet miss the warmth. I hear the chair creak as she gets up. I open my eyes. She walks to the door. But she doesn't open it, she just stands there. Her hands are at her sides, the little one and the big one. Her little shoulder sags. She turns round, I close my eyes. She comes back to the bed. I can hear her letting herself down on the chair. Her arms come around my feet, she presses them against her breast, tight, still tighter, she bends her neck, she presses her forehead against the arches of my feet, hard. The wolf and the rat and the pig, the syrinx and the tambourine, the whole merciless music she crumples up with one stroke against my ankles.

Was it the day after Jak's breakdown that everything changed once more? Was it the morning after?

You didn't want to remember all the things he'd said the night before. A pig with wings. Was he out of his mind? And the so-called fairytale that he contrived for himself out of it all? How could he distort your lives together like that?

In spite of the sleeping draught you couldn't sleep. You were too scared to go and see whether Jak was back. At five o'clock you were up. Put on milk for coffee, went out into the backyard to throw away the shards of the earthenware jug that Jak had broken the night before. What goes up must come down, you said to yourself as you dumped the shards in the bin, your father's words for the aftermath of family clashes.

The upper door of the outside room was open. You heard Agaat mumbling to herself over her ironing, the creaking of the ironing-board, smelt the steam and the starch, the thud-thud of the little iron with which she always ironed, a glimpse of the white apron in the dark little room. She was already dressed in her black dress and cap and shoes. Was ironing the apron, for the second time apparently, the seam, the bands, the pockets on the bib and the stomach.

She was frowning, shaking her head, as if trying to understand something, lost in a world of her own. You put your hands over your ears and fled back to the kitchen. You wanted to hear nothing more, could tolerate nothing more after the night before, suddenly fearful for all of you so constantly getting in each other's way, trespassing on each other's private space, beset by each other's catastrophes. But there the milk was boiling over on the stove and you had to rescue it, clean the hob before it scalded. Then you heard the litany.

Help me with this and help me with that, and then a silence. And after a few thud-thuds of the iron on the board: She wanted him to be the master, she thought badly of herself, thought she was stupid, thought she was weak, she didn't want to be her own master.

The irons were vigorously changed around on the hotplate.

But this is bad and that is wrong and gibe, gibe, gibe, constantly, whatever you do.

There was a hissing sound as Agaat sprinkled water on the ironing-cloth.

It was Jak's emphatic strain of the night before.

God, must I listen to this for a second time, you thought, with the cloth drenched with burnt milk in your hands.

And what did he do, the poor man? He just tried harder to be good enough!

And then suddenly there was a another voice, higher, lighter, your voice.

What does that have to do with Agaat? She's the best in the land, the best governess one could wish for!

You unlatched the screen door from its hook to make it slam.

At the top of her voice it resounded there out of the dark door-hole of the outside room:

Praise the Lord with joy resounding, oh my soul how rich the gift!

An exercise in prayerful attendance indeed. Thunder in the outside room when there's lightning in the sitting room.

You went out onto the front stoep, the red bakkie was parked outside under the fig tree, its front wheels turned at an angle over the roots. So you must after all have dozed off, you thought, because you didn't hear Jak come in during the night.