Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [155]
13
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