Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [174]
Come come bath in my hands
my hands my song of deformity (could that be? perhaps I mis-
heard here? & it just went on and on)
I’m the riches of the ridges
The palms of palmyra are mine
Where’s the what of the wattle?
Where the fen of the fennel?
With me!
I’m the end of the river-bend
And the breadth of the Breede
I’m the why of the whynot
I’m the where of the nowhere
I’m the blood of the bluegum.
Stop stop! Jakkie shouted please stop that’s enough! No that’s what you wanted isn’t it! A. said now you must listen! & she teases him because he doesn’t want to get out of the bath naked in front of her & he can’t run away & he just has to stay and listen there until she’s finished singing & then she sang even louder to irritate him & then she patched together a little tune with talking in-between a whole performance there in the steam condensing ever more densely on the windows.
I’m my brother’s keeper
His white apron strings
And the ash that turns to ashes
I have the tongues of fire of men and of angels
The riddle of riddle-bread I know
But my tongue is a stake in my mouth
Coals of fire I heap upon my head
Yes, less than lesser
The least amongst you
Bushwillow cedar and wild olive
The turn of the wheel is
the curl
of the tip
of the maidenhair fern
am I
On and on it went in that vein. Jesuschrist Agaat says Jakkie but you really can sit and sing a lot of shit on a box get going I want to get out now! but I heard him just now mutter-muttering in his voice that’s starting to break—my child!—growing up so fast!—there in his room heard him singing over & over on A.’s contrived tune her heathenish song that carries on to all sides.
the why of the whynot
the where of the nowhere
the mouth of the mother
the faith of the father & the blood
the blood of the bitter bluegum.
14
A church hat, a stuffed lynx head, a ram’s horn, a silver sugar-bowl, a braying-stone, a mouldboard. What a mess here in my room. I no longer want to look at anything, no longer want to be distracted by the light of day, the things of the light. They press on my eyeballs when I open my eyes. From now on I’m keeping my eyes shut, from now on I am gazing at the inside of my eyelids.
Unseeing in a more silent silence, in the black-red of shut eyes I want to lie, a cello in its case, in this made-to-measure niche that my body has become for me, here I want to dream my way to that whiter light of which the book of death speaks. Here I want only just to hear the last hurried footsteps in the passages, and there far away in the front of the hall, behind the last door swinging shut, the sounds of tuning, the concert, that without me may at last commence. I want to drift away from it all, replaced by a substitute who is following the conductor’s baton out there with shining eyes.
This savage parade, the last illuminations.
I have seen enough, heard enough of this procession. What must I still know or try to understand here? What is the message of the moribund air in this vault? Or is this how the sheet of a last summer rests on one, a white drift blown backward from the comb of the wave? As if it wants to tie the wave back into the body of the sea, so that its breaking is aborted, begrudging the final spuming, rushing foam?
Unfathomable that which still weighs on me here. A warmth on my cheek at times, on my forehead, on my stomach, on my ankles, a hand that hovers above me with the weight of a longing, longing to pluck a string, to touch the shady side of a stone. As a stone would feel it, I imagine I feel it, the subtle longings, longings of a mountain wind, or a wind-blown seed, of a stray drop or a tiny lizard, of a blade of grass leaning against me. To what do they seek to edify me, these delicate bodies that waver around me? To what do they seek to move me when they measure their insignificance against mine, sink their all-but-insensible weight into my weight?
At times it is something that vibrates on my breastbone as if the stick of a toy fan has been planted there. At times, late at night, it becomes