Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [111]
It set you crying all over again. For more than the cows. For Agaat’s eye that was dry and sharp with supervising. In her mouth it was a battle hymn, that you could hear, and it was directed at you and you felt how she was piling up her case against you. It was a case for which she could locate her injustice in the very hymns of your own church, in the very mouths of the prophets of the Old Testament.
Did she have everybody on her side even then?
Jak could in any case not endure it too long under Agaat and her convicts. He left his bag of bones and tried to assist the vet. You yourself tried to hurry along the bone-collecting. If the singing were to carry on any longer, you felt, the walls of the homestead would tumble down like those of Jericho.
The bonemeal feeds that you administered helped to get the oxen, the bulls and the cows that had not given birth that year back into condition. But the best dairy cows, all of those that would have calved that season and that had been put to graze in the little back camp next to the river, were lost.
Three days long the deaths continued. Over and over the process repeated itself, the staggering gait with which it started, the glassy stare, the puzzled gaze, the drooping ears, the tangled coat, and the dried-up nostrils. One after the other they lay down. One by one the heads became too heavy there where they were lying in the grass. They turned their noses into their flanks trying to support their heads. The flanks collapsed. The jaws were paralysed, the tips of the tongues lolled on the teeth in front, drool and foam glistened around the mouths, heavily the great brown gullets moved up and down. One after the other soft, pining death you accompanied, your hand on the flank, your hand on the little crown between the ears. You wept by your cows. The best of them were descendants of the animals you had known as a child. Aandster’s great-great-grandchild, Pieternella’s distant cousins, all the meek caramel-coloured mothers.
When the convicts had gone and all the cows were buried, Agaat came to you. She came to sit by you in your room with Jakkie drinking his bottle in her arms. She put the old green Handbook on your lap. Her voice was neutral. Her eyes shone.
Open on page 221, she said, open, and ask me anything, I am fully learned now, about anything that can possibly happen to a cow.
the countenance of doctors is the seat of dissimulation the whispered consultation behind the screens i don’t add up on any side am wrong geometry am failed electricity am vapour before the sun am nothing more than particles and waves my irradiated skeleton a room-divider my head in a tunnel my neck in a hole my leg in a bath my arms weightless groping for nothing in sleeves of lead in cylinders full of pink water wild and waste is death before death in a solution of salts i am dipped painted with mediums contending for dominance water earth fire and air a quadruple judgement hangs over my neck invisible eels prick the skin of the fingertips skin that provisionally enshrouds my failure a fascicle of breath engirdled by fate against him the intact the voluble the preserved in his coat of whitewash i fear mrs de wet the worst oh my soul you are audited by a battery of stethoscopes gallery of savants who are gauging the woman who cannot break an egg the woman who cannot sweep with a broom the one in hundredthousand mrs de wet oh genuflecting deeply edified congregation of god in swellendam all in the twinkling of an eye compassionate in tones of gloating resounds the intercession she must fall safely as rain in winter o Lord must descend soughing like a manna of edible butterflies while silent assistants connect me to electrodes transilluminate me weigh me the specific gravity of my spirit which i must surrender if i correctly understand the explanation of gradual enfeeblement on the dials of the control panels of the angels with flaming swords the electromyographers their needles in my flesh they whisper in unison the sickness of charcot the sickness of lou gehrig now the