Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [161]
At least you still have ears to hear! If your gut looks like the inside of your ears we don’t have a problem! Pure sweet-potato peat! All the way to the portals! Don’t keep looking at me like that! What more can I do? Everything is here now. Must I then divert the water from the godgiven drift itself through this room for you? Install a pump down there and lay a pipe to the room and flood everything like a deluge? Well, let me tell you, it’s dry! The drift is dry! There’s nothing left in it.
Forgive me.
How’s that?
Forgive me!
I didn’t say anything!
Or do you think perhaps that you’re in the ark here? That I have to cart in two of everything? You and I! That’s the two! That’s Two enough!
Forgive me!
Give you what? Arsenic or arsenite or arsenate? Don’t be silly. We’ll start with the usual medicine, otherwise it will just have to be an enema again. You can’t lie here like this. You’ll poison yourself.
She thinks she can scare me with her talk. I don’t scare any more. I’m tired. She tires me. I tire her. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her ankles seem swollen. When she sits on the chair, I see her knees, bloated like those of a pregnant woman. We wear each other out. How is this to end if she doesn’t want to make an end of it with me?
She puts on her glasses for the next task. Now the nails, she says, you know you dig holes into yourself. Just see what it looks like here, ai!
She straightens the fingers of my right hand. I’ve been feeling it for a while now. The cutting into my palms. But it wasn’t on the list. When I looked at my hands to try and draw her attention to them, she briefly rubbed them or tucked them away under the sheets. She shies away from the shrivelled little claws of mine, I can see it in her face. But tonight they’re on her list. Now that the room is full again, I’m the one who must be pruned back, scraped out all the way to my cuticles. So the wheel turns. Hip up, hop down.
In my right palm the nail of my middle finger has cut through the skin. The other nails have curled upwards where they’ve been pressed against the inside of my hand. Two are ingrown. That shuts Agaat up. Neglected area. Nothing that can inflame her more. She works away at every problem systematically. Little crescents of nail-clippings fall on the sheet amongst the hair. Into the quick the ingrown nails are filed away. The cuticles are pushed back. The cuts in my palms are disinfected, are given fresh plasters.
Now the feet. The dog’s-nails are filed down. I smell horn. The calluses on my feet are anointed with emollient. The minutes are counted while they dry. Then the filings are rubbed off.
A quarter strikes in the sitting room, how many does that make? I’ve lost count. What could the time be? It feels like deep, deep in the night. No other sounds except those of these foolish ministrations, the click of the tweezers, the rasping of the files, the tchi, tchi, tchi of the rubber soles around the bed, the white cap that ascends and descends over parts of my body. Is she establishing a firebreak? Is it to save time when I have to be coffined? Her lips now and again relax out of the straight line, they gape, as if she’s gasping for extra breath, now and again she compresses them completely, keeps them tightly pursed. A notch between her eyebrows. I can’t see her eyes.
Agaat recovers the faculty of speech when she beholds my hairy shins.
Orang-utan, she says. She clears her throat.
I don’t want to know what your armpits look like by this time. Stubble-field! Don’t let us forget about them!
She takes her magnifying glass, inspects my face.
And the stubble on your chin. And just look at how your eyebrows curl up. Little brushes in the nostrils. Heavens, seems to me there are two evenings’ work here.
Her voice is thick. She stands back. She takes off her glasses. She rubs her eyes.
Let’s just shave the old legs and then go to bed, she says, tomorrow is another day.
My left leg is soaped. The first stroke draws blood.
Thin,