Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [231]
I no longer know. I drift off without knowing, I dream I come to and it’s another day’s evening or two afternoons later. All that I know is that the winking-reflex is gone in my right eye, all that I feel is a faint spasm now and again round the eyeball, but the eyelids no longer move.
Now Agaat comes and with the fingers of her small hand she presses the lower lid up to keep the eye moist. But I know what she thinks would be preferable. I can see it in her face, that jaw. She’ll stick down the staring eye with a wad of cotton wool and a plaster.
Nobody can want to wink someone else’s eye for her.
Enough is enough.
How to make peace with one eye, an unfathomable interpreter and the alphabet? If peace it can be called.
Can I make it with her?
We could make a flower garden. She dug up a photo here that Dawid still took of us, when the trellising for the rambling roses was put up. Our faces, Agaat’s and mine, elated with working and planning. We’re standing there amongst the holes and the trenches and the heaps of soil, but we look as if we can already see everything in flower.
Could one hope for more, after all?
I smell the gillyflowers, the wild pinks through the open door.
Would that have to be peace enough for us? The paradisiacal garden?
Next to me is the large hydrangea arrangement. How long have I been sleeping? Two days? Three? Four? This morning she gave the flowers a look that I know but too well. Past their prime. One day more. Then they have to get out of here. Onto the compost heap. Ready to be dug in.
Pray, she repeats my first word of the talking-hour. A light touch of disbelief I discern there.
She steps back from the board, places the duster in the corner. There’s a red streak of dust on her sock. Her cap is skew. Where was she again in the night? She turns to the mirror. Arms by the sides. Then she lifts her hands. But they don’t go to her head. It’s not to pin her cap straight. She regards herself with her hands in the air. Outnumbered, it says. Surrender.
P·R·A·Y, I asked. It’s the only opening I can devise to initiate what I want to plead for. Don’t throw them out. Our blue-purple hydrangeas. Don’t throw yourself out, and me neither. Hold us for a while yet. There is beauty also in flowers that fade. Their last hour provides stuff for contemplation. Contemplate it for me. For whom do you in any case want to refresh the vase? It’s our last flower arrangement with a history in this room. Remember, you salvaged the vase. And stuck it together. And it never leaked.
She reads to me from the Bible every evening. Lamentations. How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street. And then she prays. The Our Father. The safest prayer under the circumstances. Forgive us our trespasses.
Now it’s morning. The curtains are open. I’ve been washed, she’s dripped three drops of tea with a dropper at the back of my tongue, wiped out the inside of my mouth with a sponge, cursorily. The tea was cold. She’d forgotten to add sugar. The sponge was rough, bitterish. Aloe. Wormwood. The peppermint’s run out, and why buy a new tube at this stage?
Last night, was it last night? Or the night before last? The squabble about Jakkie? I could still blink with both eyes.
She spelt out everything I wanted to say. Not a word in reply. Stepped forward and back with the stick, kept on her glasses so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Looked at what I was blinking, tapped short and sharp with the duster handle, let me have my say as fast as she could, her voice neutral in repeating my questions for me, said nothing in reply. It was worse like that than when she imitates my intonation. That’s been her style the last few days. Cool and casual. But there’s a rumbling somewhere inside her.
I feel the tea trickle out of me. Would it be warmer now than when it went into me? Sweeter? Or salty? Or sad? I feel devastated by my outburst and spelt out like that I don’t even have the excuse that I lost my temper spontaneously, I wanted