Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [159]
Not difficult to decipher, the tapping. It’s Morse code for The Pan. It says: More hairs come forth from your head, Mrs de Wet, than dung from your belly. The Skull Pan is replete but the Other Pan is empty. Almost seven days nothing but winds in it.
Shit and hair. The last secretions of the almost-dead. Shit and hair.
Like old oil still leaking from an engine on the scrap-heap. And piss and nails. That’s why they stopper you with a plug or two. So that you don’t start oozing and spoil your coffin, or interrupt the sermon. That’s why they draw a little net over your hair. So that your skull doesn’t start rustling. And that’s why they bind up your jaw. So that the tongue doesn’t erupt in post-mortem gabbling.
Beloved, go forth in peace and pinch your noses. In the name of the Lord who created heaven and earth because He also designed the fragrant death. The jaw drops open with a snap. Bluetongue put out at the pulpit cloth. Lisping among the lilies.
That’s the kind of disgrace that must be guarded against.
I look at myself in the mirror. Wordlessly my eyes blaspheme. How many watts worth of sacrilege? Blasphemy without the use of the orbicularis oris muscles. That’s what she wants from me. She wants to see how far she can push me. Drained to the last of the lees. On my knees in the sawdust. In the dry course of the drift. In the place where the last footlight fades to black.
Agaat puts the mirror down flat. She wipes my eyes, she wipes away the spit dribbling from my mouth.
Who needs the old mirror anyway, she says, rather look at what I’ve displayed for you, the whole of Grootmoedersdrift, Ounooi, from front to back. Better than the movies.
I hear another language in the clacking of the scissors.
What more can you want? Speaking of hair, it gets into my hair, I can tell you, it gets into my hair looking after you like this!
Tchip. A big shiny swallow with two sharp wings, a flying dive narrowly missing my eyebrows.
A dirty-grey skein of hair falls on the sheet. More than an inch I’d say, more than two even.
Agaat likes an open face.
It carried on for three days, the carrying-in. Where she had stored it all, everything that had been on the discard heap, I don’t know. In the cellar? Sometimes I heard a bumping and bustling here under me. Other items emerged from the storeroom, from the outside room. Everything that she’d removed from the room here has been restored. The built-in cupboards are filled with my clothes again. She brought in armloads at a time with hangers and all and piled them up on my bed, spread out shawls and skirts before me, pressed the jerseys against my cheek. The soft red mohair, the little maroon one that smells of Chanel No. 5 that she was so mad about when she was small. The dances, the mountains, the snow, the sea. Everything back into the drawers.
The hat-stand, the walking stick stand with all the umbrellas, the walking frame, the trolley. She came wheeling in here at speed, in one or other of my wheelchairs, first with the Spyder as if she were taking part in a paraplegic race and then all whooshing with the Redman and then standing in the IBot with the knee-support flapped up. Like the Popemobile it looked. All that was missing was for her to wave blessings. The head-dress everybody would have recognised.
I went to sleep intermittently with all the activity. Sometimes I thought I was dreaming. When I woke up there was a clattering in the passage and then yet another object was dragged in from the shed. A bag of guano, a bag of chicken feed, a can of dipping fluid, a can of vaccine, the ploughshare from under the wild fig tree and the pipe for striking it, a silver corner post, three droppers, freshly-tarred, feathers of the red rooster, feathers of the white rooster, a sheaf of wheat, a bag of compost, a ram’s horn, a horseshoe, a skein of the finest wool. Held in front of my nose for me to smell, all of it. Rustling, the grasses, the pods. Struck, the gong, shaken out, the coir sacks,