Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [233]
I tried to turn my eye up, downwards, sideways, but for the first time
it was stuck, totally unyielding in its socket and I had to keep looking at her. I relaxed my focus, tried to haze out the image. But under the white cap the brown smudge of Agaat’s face kept looming, distorted, rippling, like an underwater statue singing.
The motherly full-mouthed sheep
will disinterestedly
calm the little weanlings,
and lure them to the grazing and to water
so that they do not lose condition.
Carefully to milk out the bereaved ewe,
is on the other hand your duty,
the more so if you have been blessed
with an abundant season.
When the song was done, she wrenched back her arm into its sleeve and went and sat in the Redman Chief, strapped herself in, clicked shut the buckle and started reading from a blue booklet. Only her lips moved. When she saw I was looking at her, she pressed the knob, grabbed the steering column and turned the chair, a soughing right-about turn. Only the high black back I could see, the chrome grips on either side, the deeply treaded black rubber of the back wheels. Only a whispering I heard from time to time from behind the backrest, moaning sounds, as if the chair had a life of its own.
Could I have dreamed it all? The snuffling, the forward and backward manoeuvring of the chair, the leisurely turnabouts, first this way round and the other way round? The fluttering of pages, the tearing sounds, the groaning, the sighing? The backward recline setting, the forward incline setting, the automatic rocking function, at a small angle, just lightly to and fro, to go to sleep? To relieve the bodily aches of the seated?
Did I think it all up? Such a bare shoulder you could surely not dream up? Such a chair? There it looms in the middle of the room, a throne of black leather and chrome, the embroidery heaped up on the seat. Like a burnished throne.
I’m not dreaming now, I’m wide awake. It’s morning, I smell the garden, I see the hydrangea arrangement. I remember. Over there in the corner stands the duster where Agaat has just put it down.
P•R•A•Y , I spelled.
Pray, she repeated, with the trace of a question in it. She’s waiting for me to speak more. How can I explain why I want a prayer to be said? A way in it is, a snare. How else am I to find out what she’s turning over in her mind? Where she went to in the night?
Three times I was aware of her standing next to my bed in the dark. After the last time I heard her go out at the back. But I didn’t hear the outside room’s door open. It was the door of the storeroom. I heard something fall, a clattering of spades and tools, a muffled exclamation. And then nothing, only the wind, and floating on it a rumour, an image, an intimation of discord, of lamentation, of a beating of the breast, the white cross straining across shoulders, screams in the night, against the red stones, in the red dust of summer, a shaking of the firmament, a star shower, a dark glow from the mountain, a weal across the eye, across the cheek, a burning grey bloom, but not my own tears. Old as the bloom on black-ripe Christmas plums it was, soft and powerful. I heard the dogs bark, in the distance, high up, from across the river, from the direction of the mountain. Boela’s bark, Koffie’s bark, upset, deranged, a barking after whatever possesses human beings.
Pray for me, Agaat, pray for whatever possesses human beings. Pray for the last plum season that I shall live to see.
You can’t prescribe people’s prayers.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation. And forgive us our trespasses.
How simple that sounds, but who leads whom and who trespasses against whom here?
Why create a temptable human being?
Forty days in the wilderness! Here it is, marked down for me in the calendar. 6 November to 16 December. The calendar is clamped fast to the reading stand, over the commission, over the symptoms and their futile bygone treatment.
Forty days. All the kingdoms of the world, if thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall