Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [204]
Maybe bake a large chocolate cake? Place a nice bunch of flowers in front of hr door as a surprise & on the 12th drive with her to Witsand? She’s so fond of the sea when it rains. So many shades of grey & white she always says such an almost black sea.
16
W·H·O S·T·A·R·T·E·D T. F·I·R·E O·N M·O·U·N·T·A·I·N, I ask.
I look at the alarm clock. It’s taken ten minutes to spell out, even with Agaat’s abbreviations of articles and conjunctions.
Do you think it was me by any chance? Agaat asks with her eyes. She looks away quickly.
Yes, I signal, according to our customary code. One blink with both eyes.
She looks at me just long enough to catch my reply.
Hottentot madonna, she says.
She pushes at the side of her cap, she grasps the stick of the duster more firmly, she lets me continue, she taps on the chart. After every tap she looks at me. A tap B tap C tap D tap.
D is right I blink with my right eye. It must be so boring for her. Then she ticks from A again. I stop her on I, I is right.
And then she has to start tapping again from the beginning, as far as D. D·I·D We again spelt ‘did’.
D·I·D Y·O·U S·T·A·R·T T·H·E F·I·R·E . . .
In the hayloft? she completes my sentence. Quite correct, that’s what I wanted to ask. She places the duster upright in the corner. End of conversation.
I should have stuck to the weather, to the rainfall figures, the sheep-stealing statistics for the year of Our Lord 1996. I should have kept to pure farming matters, to how she wants to run things henceforth here on Grootmoedersdrift. I should have known that by this time.
She comes to stand by my bed. She folds her hands on her stomach. Her reply comes direct and without hesitation.
The cream separator, she says, to ensure that it works properly, place it on a solid foundation and make sure that it is dead level. If a machine separates badly, that may be because it is turned too fast or too slow. The speed can be adjusted only when the milk-supply tank is half empty. If a first-class machine does not separate properly, it is because the supply tank is out of balance and vibrates excessively, or because the centrifuge is not calibrated in the spring when the milk is poor and again in the autumn when it is richer. Watch the spout where the cream runs through. If the cream tends to cover the spout, the speed is too high for the quantity of milk passing through the supply tank, if it emerges from the spout in scallops, it is being turned too slowly. If the cream falls from the spout into the cream dish almost but not quite perpendicularly, that is in the case of the vast majority of creamers about the right consistency. In any case rinse the supply tank regularly with skimmed milk.
Farmer’s Handbook. I was asking for it. Douse the fire with cream. Extremely original. What argument can I bring against that? She will recite all her texts to me rather than talk to me openly.
I flicker my eyes. Bravo! that means.
She ignores me. She bends to unhook the urine bag. She drags the chamber pot under the open tube to catch the drops. Tip, I hear it drop on the enamel, tip.
Leroux first came to fit the catheter for the urine bag and then came to make the hole for the gut bag. Home surgery with local anaesthetic. Agaat’s decision. The wound was supposed to heal first before the bag could be attached, but it wouldn’t. Now every time she empties the bag she has to perform a major disinfection around the stoma. She enjoys it. All my orifices interest her. The more I have the better.
I had to be moved as little as possible, was the consensus. The pan was too high for me. So lower the madam. That was what Agaat decided. Make a hole in her side. She threatens me every