Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [156]
This morning I heard Dawid talking in the kitchen. Demolish, I heard and build and three extra houses please in the place of the corrugated-iron hovels that have been put up there for the children of Julies, of Kadys.
There was a long silence. It was only Agaat and Dawid there, she’d sent out the other two. At last she spoke, loud and clear so that I could also hear.
One thing at a time, Dawid, she said, you must just make do until after the funeral. Till after the New Year, I’d say. Draw up your plans so long, work out how many bricks and bags of cement it’s going to take, corrugated iron, doors, windows, everything, I’ll check it and then I’ll see what I can do, but I’m telling you now there are too many of you, I’m not building more than two new houses, in the place of the old ones that are falling to pieces and exactly the same size, but I’m not building extra houses, you can decide amongst yourselves which three of the six and their families will go, we’re never going to need all of them and I can in any case not carry on paying them all and I don’t like unpaid hungry labourers sitting around here getting up to no good and stealing my sheep. And those who stay on, they must stop breeding or I’ll have the women fixed, sooner rather than later. Everything is going to get smaller here now, that you’ve known for more than a year now, if I need people for big jobs, I’ll hire kaffirs on contract, as at shearing time, it’s much simpler and cheaper too, all the farmers are doing it like that now. They come, they work, they eat, they sleep on sacks in the shed and I pay them and their boss comes and fetches them. No drunken brawls, no stabbings, no loafing around and no babies that I have to catch and that get ill and that I have to doctor and keep healthy all their lives.
Dawid didn’t talk back. There was a silence and then the slamming of the screen door.
Is that what’s bringing out her nastiness? The new order?
Snip, Agaat cuts with the sharp-pointed scissors in the air, snip, snip, while she regards me from all sides. She pretends to restrict her gaze to my surface, to the wet strands of hair plastered straight against my scalp, up against the tent around my neck. She pretends that everything about me is purely a matter of layout and systematic attack.
But actually she’s looking for a peephole. She wants to see what I think of her latest installations here in the room. Straight into me she wants to peer, direct, as if there were a silver screen behind my eyelids full of moving images that could provide her with a truer, more intimate version of my reaction. As if I could contain any secrets that she doesn’t know.
She has carried everything she could think of into my room and covered the walls with it.
Only not the maps.
Why should she at this stage want to disregard the maps? From the day that I’ve been lying here and can no longer move around in a wheelchair, I’ve been hearing the door of the sideboard open. Tchick, open, tchick, closed. One of the imbuia pieces from my mother still, just like the dressing table here in the bedroom. With the powerful little magnets and the copper lips on the inside of the catches. Tchick. A seamlessly solid and impenetrable object, with its heavy undulating edge on top and scalloped fringe below. Congealed on ball-and-claw feet. Squatting. Full of dangling little copper handles and festoons. Like an old-fashioned American negress in the National Geographic. With many gold rings, earrings and nose-rings. Hunkering. Tchick, open, and after a while, tchick, closed. Then I knew Agaat had selected herself another blue booklet, to come and deposit here with me for the time being. With an announcement of the title that she had thought up herself, a foretaste of the evening’s reading. Not backward at all in getting good mileage out of it. Now the books from two little parcels are lying here with dog-eared pages and I hear the same old stories ad nauseam. Where are the rest? Surely there was a third parcel?
Other than that there are