Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [230]
Then it looked at the ground and jutted out the chin! First sulk! First clear facial expression to play on my feelings! It excited me very much, but I can’t show it. Tidy up your face, then you’ll have jelly, I say. Then she rearranged the face and looked me straight in the eye, ever so sanctimonious. I had to look away. Couldn’t help wanting to laugh. Just like a little puppy that begs even though she knows she’s not allowed to.
5 February
Is eating well now, every day. Chicken and vegetables, with the hands when I’m not looking. First little slice of brown bread as well. Just has to be hungry enough. Doesn’t want to handle cutlery herself yet. Just as if she doesn’t want the insides of her hands to be seen. A few times already I’ve forced open the hands, pressed in the palms, felt through all knucklebones, couldn’t feel anything wrong, except that the small hand is colder and limper. Perhaps also it’s just become lazy, from being hidden all the time and never being used, the little arm though is clearly deformed.
You could fold the pink sweet’s wrapper, I say, don’t think I didn’t see it. You can do everything with those little hands of yours. She just stares at me with big eyes.
6 February
I open the little weak hand and put the hand-bell in it, I shake it with my hand folded around hers, but when I let go, she drops the bell.
7 February
Devised a little game, call-each-other-with-bells. I take the bronze bell and she has the silver one with her in the room. If she answers my ringing with her ringing, I’ll unlock the door of her room, I say. I ring it in the kitchen and creep closer and peep through the slot. What would make her so scared of picking up something, I wonder? She sits and just looks at the bell, does though hold it now for a few seconds if I put it in her deformed hand. We’re going to make it strong, I say, we’re going to make it clever just like your other hand, we’re going to exercise it and give it nice things to do every day.
8 February
Went to see Ds van der Lught in town this morning. Quite patient and fatherly. It’s a very big responsibility, he says, but the Lord put it in your way to teach you patience and humility.
Only over tea could I bring myself to touch on the matter of the name. The nicknames with which she grew up in her own home, he just shook his head, was immediately very helpful, took thick reference books off his shelf. ‘Agaat’ he suggested then. Odd name, don’t know it at all, but then he explained, it’s Dutch for Agatha, it’s close to the sound of Asgat with the guttural ‘g’, it’s a semi-precious stone, I say, quite, he says, you only see the value of it if it’s correctly polished, but that’s not all, look with me in the book here, it’s from the Greek ‘agathos’ which means ‘good’. And if your name is good, he says, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like a holy brand it will be, like an immanent destiny, the name on the brow, to do good, to want to be good, goodness itself. We’ll have her baptised accordingly when she’s a bit bigger, when she can understand what’s happening to her, he says. Then we knelt and he prayed for me and for Agaat and the commission I’d accepted and he thanked the Lord for another heathen soul added to the flock by the good works of a devoted child of God, a stalk gathered into the sheaf.
I must write the commission as Dominee helped me to clarify it today. My task and vocation with this. Now I no longer feel so alone with it. And I must write up the beginning, the beginning of everything, before I forget the feeling, of how I found her and knew she was mine.
17
P·R·A·Y I make Agaat spell. P tap R tap A tap Y tap, that’s right, P·R·A·Y.
I do it with the left eye. It’s the only one that can still blink. The other one, the right, has started staring, overnight. Or a few nights