Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [207]
If I have managed to produce something, an exposition, complete with nevertheless and notwithstanding, it’s my turn to exert pressure. Then she must reply. It’s only common decency, her responding, I spelt out for her. But she often remains quiet. Or she says, next sentence please. Or she shrugs her shoulders, which means, you answer it yourself. Or she puts down the duster and walks out. Or she looks at me until I shut my eyes.
Put in a bookmark, she says then, then we can remember where we were, this is one of your long stories again, and I can’t see how it’s to end.
I was alone, I felt useless, I wanted to do something for my fellow humans.
She goes to stand by the stoep door and looks out. Or she takes up after a while where we left off, and leaves me talking to myself.
I did not realise what a big responsibility it would be, I did not think far enough.
Just go ahead and forget that I’m here, her face says, I just spell out everything for you and say it out loud so that you can hear what you sound like.
Jak was always against it and I resisted him, for years I resisted him but the pressure was too great and then I gave in.
She can’t always keep her voice neutral. She charges my sentences with her own resonances. Disbelief, emphasis, mockery. She adds on and improvises. To my own ears I sound like running commentary rather than original intention.
Do something for your fellow humans? Or do something with your fellow humans or to your fellow humans? Fellow human or in- or superhuman? Or half human? Less human than yourself?
Sometimes when we’ve completed a sentence, she doesn’t repeat it at all, so that I lose my thread amongst stray words.
Sorry. Powerless. Guilty. I am. I shall be. But. How am I to. Die. Question mark.
Then she changes the subject. Or she says, for heaven’s sake get to the point, Ounooi, you’re much too long-winded again today.
As if there were endless days extending before me. As if tomorrow could be much different for me from today.
It takes so much time, this business. Clarity is not guaranteed. It causes misunderstandings instead, that we then laboriously have to clear up again. The tapping and winking and spelling is harder on my eyes than the splint ever was heavy on my hand. Her prefabricated phrases block me rather than help me, my language feels like a brutal instrument with which I’m torturing myself. How long will I still be able to blink my eyes? The left wants to droop shut, the right opens wider than I’m used to. If my eyelids freeze, that’s the end.
The chance, I’m getting a last chance. Perhaps I should rather associate freely than try to explain point by point, let her see who I’ve become in the meantime, here speechless on my bed, delirious, yearning, a poet of losses, a teller of legends.
The task weighs more heavily on my mind than the writing of my last words when I could still write. It’s more momentous than the making of my inventories for the clearing-out, my will, my self-determination codicil.
It’s more difficult than any last wish. It causes complications at a stage when she, and I, had hoped that things would become easier. Now the close will be more difficult than either of us could ever have predicted.
I can understand very well that she wants to keep the talking within limits, has established a fixed structure for it. She keeps us to it strictly. One hour in the morning, one hour in the evening.
Before she goes to bed, I’m granted another few sentences, if she feels the need herself, when she’s done reading from the blue booklets, the last parcel from the sideboard, the first lot that I filled with my writing, without abbreviations, full particulars with the explicitness of the beginner.
She took a long time to remove the string with which it was still bound. The first few days that it was lying here, she fiddled with the knot a few times, but then let it be again. At length she snipped