Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [118]
How can I blame you for wanting to vanish, Agaat? That you want to get away from me, away from the tyranny of me? More inescapable than ever, now that I can say or do nothing, now that I myself am floundered, and am immoveable as the stones. I would want to open myself to you and take you up into myself and comfort you. But I cannot, because I am your adversary exactly because I am as I am, mute and dense, and you are looking for a safe refuge from me. Under your own stones.
How can I accompany you to where you are now? At the heart of the hearth, under the soot, where you want to conceal yourself, under the foundations, under the stone strata, where they are blue, where you find a crevice into which to disappear, and haul in the block of stone on top of you, so that you can be occluded, with your arm over your head, with your fist in your mouth? Until nobody searches for you any more, to draw you out, to split you into parts and stretch you over spars and to infuse you and to chafe you and to rap you till you scream, till you sing, till you dance to their tune? Till you feel time click shut behind you and everything else falls silent, in your mouth no taste any more save the clean chalky tang of lime and scale?
So that I can come to be there with you, with my hand on your hip bone, with my hand on your shoulder tip to wait with you in the dark. For them to be rendered white and tidy, your bones, one by one, your clavicle, like a rudder, like an ensign, your shoulder blades like fans, your ribs shiny spokes, inside them a cleared hold, with every mast and beam caulked and planished in the dense rock face, the rock that retreats before your entry, a small fanfare. So that you can come to rest with all that is yours fixed and impermeable like pitch, your sails furled.
How can I be with you while you become a fern, a jaw of something inchoate, a keel, a beckoning nodule that flows in the grain of stone?
I shall go and lie with my head in that corner, with my ear on the place where the last trace of you lingered. I shall draw the suppurate stain of you into my nose, careful that you should not mark me, so that you shall be free of me, and free of yourself, a fume, a dark blemish that mists over the stone on which I am lying with my cheek.
Open at page 221, Agaat said. Her voice was clear. She put the old Farmer’s Handbook on your lap. End of October it was, 1960, the year of the botulism.
Ask me from the beginning, she said, ask me all the symptoms, and all the cures, ask me trick questions, I’ve learnt it all, I know everything now, I’ll never make a mistake again.
Never mind Agaat, you wanted to say, but your voice wouldn’t come. You sat there crying but she struck up and launched into her lesson. She wanted to force you upright. In spite of the battle between you, or for its sake, because how was she to fight you if you were weak? How was she to hate you?
You couldn’t come to terms with the loss of your Jersey cows, and her voice trying to create order and call things by their name, made you cry more. It was the third day that you had stayed in your room after the catastrophe with the botulism. Jakkie was with you most of the time in his cradle. Even his rosebud mouth, his little hand around your finger, couldn’t console you.
First bone-hunger, then general dirt-craving, she started. First os-teopha-gia, then allo-tri-opha-gia.
She sounded out the big Latin words.
Degenerated appetite it was. That’s how the vet had explained it to her, she said. Then she went and read up all the rest in her book.
Agaat looked at Jak who had come to listen in the doorway. He nodded at her to carry on. You felt how the accident had brought you closer to each other, closer, but in complex self-conscious ways. Jakkie woke up later in his cradle, he was the only one who reminded you all of your capacity for innocence.
When you could no longer contemplate the deaths and the putting-down, you took the child and left Agaat there with the autopsy. You saw how she came forward