Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [11]
I can see that you’re a very good nurse, Agaat, said Leroux after studying the calendar. Excellent records. Keep up the good work.
And she did. Unstoppable she was. She unscrewed the inside door of my bedroom because my new bed wouldn’t pass through.
Don’t be stupid, I wanted to say, bring it along the stoep and through the swing-door. But by that time I couldn’t really speak all that well any more.
Perhaps it’s better like this. Now I can hear everything that goes on in the house. I can hear Agaat approaching. I can hear what her footsteps sound like. I can adjust myself.
My bedroom door was the last door she unscrewed. The other doors in the house disappeared one by one.
So that Ounooi shouldn’t have to turn doorknobs, so that Ounooi can get in and out easily with her walking sticks and her walking frame and her wheelchair, she said.
But that was just one half of the reason. The other half is her own problem, Agaat doesn’t like closed doors. And she doesn’t like cluttered surfaces.
She carried in a melamine surface on trestles and on that everything we need is arranged in rows and piles against the wall. Packs of swabs, neckbraces for every occasion, quick-drying sheets, mattress protectors, clean hospital gowns, bedpans. Under the trestle table are three enamel pails with lids.
There’s a triple-level stainless hospital trolley with washbasin and clean cloths and towels and disinfectants and medicinal soap.
And a smaller trolley of hard plastic with removable baskets containing my medicines and pills in bottles and boxes. Fresh water in a carafe. Sponges, cotton wool, ear-buds, ointment for my lips that dry out, paper towels for accidents, tissues for drool, for tears. Things get disordered quickly in the trolley. Agaat tidies it every day, sees to it that all the bottles and tubes are tightly shut.
And then there’s the bridge, a broad flat shoulder on one steel leg that fits over my bed, and on which my little bowls of food and my spout-jugs full of thickened tea can stand. And my reading stand.
Above my bed is a reading lamp, 100 watts with an adjustable head on a long arm, which can extend.
Enough light in the shearing shed, says Agaat, you don’t dip a sheep in the dark.
But normally she doesn’t switch it on at night. Only when absolutely necessary.
Next to my bed is a wooden stool on which she sits when she’s feeding me. In front of the window is her upright chair on which she sits when she reads to me or when she embroiders. She brought it in from her outside room in the backyard. She never sits there anymore anyway she says, she only washes and changes there. It’s now just her locker room, she says.
She sleeps in the passage. She needn’t, she knows that. There are many rooms in the house.
All the rooms of my house, the progress to where I am now, the history leading to this last room, the domain remaining to me. Shrinking domain. I’m locked up in my own body, my limbs form a vague contour under the bedspread.
Now my preamble stretches over my feet. They’re flat, they lie open. The bedspread subsides over my shins. My kneecaps form two bumps, the flesh has fallen from my thighs, between my hips there is a hollow. Further than that I cannot see myself. My neck is locked at the angle determined for me by Agaat. Her pillows are stacked like bunkers around me. In the mirror I can see something, a shadow of myself, my sloping shoulders, my face on which my features appear vague, as if an artist had rubbed his sleeve over a preparatory study, or flattened the modelling clay with his palm. Because the beginning failed, because the first attempt came out wrong. Because the underlying structures were not clear.
I resist. Give me a chance. Let me try myself, a self-portrait, an autobiography, life and times of Milla de Wet, her place