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If thou therefore wilt worship me, shall be thine? What’s that supposed to mean? Does she think she’s Beelzebub?

I have two days left to make a full forty. How many quarter-hours is that? I can’t count any more, the dark and the light hours, the ray of sun on the altar. Sixteen December is circled. The Day of the Covenant, the Day of Reconciliation.

An affirmative calendar! Can anybody be so deliberate! So pathetic? So literal! Or is it pure coincidence? Is everything that’s happened here pure coincidence? Is it only I who dreamed up the causes and the effects, the reasons and the grounds? And she who rearranged them? Because without that one cannot live and cannot die?

Pray for me, Agaat, wipe the grey bloom from my cheek, from your cheek. There is a possibility of lustre. The black-ripe fruit. The sweet moisture. Wipe the bloom on your sleeve. Let there be radiance.

What are you doing there in front of the mirror?

Are you verily rolling up your sleeve in front of me again?

Why the exposure all the time? What am I supposed to see that I haven’t seen yet? I know it, don’t I. Your deformed arm. I brought you up, didn’t I?

Your right sleeve, up, further up, over that shrunken hand of yours. Over that thin straight little forearm, bare as a crowbar? The round elbow a length of bent copper tubing? A brazen snake in the desert? Are you raising it above me? Your black sleeve, rolled up as far as your armpit, for a clean blow, for a straight strike? At which part of me are you going to aim? Are you going to penetrate me with it? Through the heart? With the same arm that made me pity you in the first instance?

One shouldn’t pity deformities! Every deformity is a weapon, a lever, the seat of power and devastation.

Is that what you’re trying to get across to me?

She holds the arm athwart her face. She turns it, moves it down. A fencing foil. One pace back she takes, one pace forward. Dip at the knees! Up jerks the shoulder!

Before the railings of my bed.

As on the moonlit night of the burial of the heart.

As in the Tradouw with the umbilical cord that jerks, the rope from which the child is suspended.

As before the sick bull in the holding pen.

As before the foaming waves of Witsand in the black bathing costume.

Low she keeps.

High she aims.

Does she want to charge?

Does she want to kneel?

Does she want to be assumed in glory?

What convulsion of self-exposure, what furious salutation is this?

No, she puts her knuckle in her mouth.

She takes her knuckle out of her mouth. She has broken the skin. Blood flows from it.

On this fragrant morning before my unbalanced gaze she prays.

Lord God in heaven, comes her voice.

Hear me!

Foot-rot!

Stinking smut!

She dips her head, the white cap casts a splash against the mirror.

Pip!

Roup!

Glanders!

Greasy heel!

Contagious abortion!

Waterpepper knotweed!

Who do I have other than you? Don’t go away from me! Don’t leave me! What would I ever do without you, with my words?

I’m looking for the suitcase!

Have mercy on me!

For thy Name’s sake.

Amen.

January ’84. You and Jak got a special invitation to attend the medal parade at Ysterplaat. The Air Force crest was thickly embossed on the card. The instruction was that the guests of honour should be formally dressed. Ladies requested to wear head-covering and gloves. After the ceremony a lunch with choral song in a hall and in the afternoon a military air show. Jakkie would sing and form part of a formation-flight squadron. He’d already informed you himself of the event just after returning from Operation Askari where they’d bombed the shit and toe-nails out of the Cubans, as Jak put it.

Jak came to press the card into your hand in the garden where you and Agaat were giving the roses a summer pruning.

First order, gold, Cross of Honour for outstanding service, leadership and bravery in specialised high-risk warfare, he read.

You passed the card to Agaat. Her mouth was set in a line, a flickering of eyelids. She said nothing.

You’d noticed,