Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [243]
Are we heartless, are we cruel, you and I? Then that’s only because that’s the way she wants us. She, my dear little fuzzy foundling, made us, took us apart and reassembled us. Meccano a la Milla. We are power food for her, our fury is pure vitamin. She thrives on it.
So you go ahead and inspect her well for maggots, you’re your nooi’s governess after all, and you know all about maggots don’t you, you know they enter by the soft spots, under the skin and devour you from the inside until one fine day you simply disintegrate and then everybody says, hey, that’s funny, she was never even sick.
from the easy chair to the wheelchair in three months it’s like walking with a tea trolley but without the tea instead of the teapot now Mrs de Wet poked up propped up patched up strapped up in her wheelchair she’s jingling less all the time a dream in a peel a ripple on a pool she is now herself a walking frame on wheels for her nurse her independent living-aid the good old sort she hoists ounooi into it when she has to make the bed and pushes her where she wants her doll by the window doll by the wall doll gazing limply at the floor in the hall sometimes she’s rolled up to where there’s sweeping to be done or peeling it’s better than just having to lie there on her back from wheelchair to wheelchair in less than a year the first chair that she remembers was a spyder from pride mobility products she could propel the high wheels with her own hands the second chair was electrical by redman power chairs with five gears and a joystick hopeful as a courting-candle the third an omega trac full of springs and suspension on which she could drive like an armoured tank over a dam wall the fourth was by permobil an ibot 30-2 a throne on gyroscopes that could climb stoep steps apart from electronics inspired by the purposes of a phantom the last is by froglegs an absolutely ordinary chair because even if she wanted to she could no longer go forward on her own and weaned at last of her hands and her feet and her little wheels she rolls every day like a wash of the sluice with her dreams through the frames and lintels and passages of her house
17 February 1954
Agaat reacts to her new name! I say her bedtime prayer: Gentle Jesus my name’s Agaat make clean and pure my heart. She doesn’t close her eyes, keeps gazing at me wide-eyed. Agaat is good, Agaat is sweet, Agaat’s a child of the Lord and He keeps watch over her while she sleeps. Good as gold, as rain, as salt, good as the blaze in the heart of the wood. I don’t know if my words achieve anything, I feel the child must learn to associate herself with beautiful and good things, shame still so small and already so damaged by life. I sing to her: Sleep my child, sleep tight, with roses bedight and Sleep baby sleep, Your daddy tends the sheep. Perhaps I should change the words, the child instead of my child and something I don’t know what instead of ‘your daddy’, I wouldn’t want her to get wrong ideas now, but I don’t suppose it can do any harm, she’s so small still.
20 February 1954
Agaat’s brought me something for the first time, and taken something from me. Truly a big mile-stone!
This morning still half-asleep I had this bright idea. Just suddenly knew it would work given that the hand-bell won’t, something with a greater effect, a more dramatic function it should have, and I thought and I thought and suddenly I knew just the thing! Dug up my father’s old tinderbox, demonstrated how you strike the flintstone till you get a spark. Made a little fire on a piece of corrugated iron in the backyard with wisps of grass and pine cones. Great interest! All eyes! On the haunches tight against me. Go and fetch another pine cone, I say. Would you believe it she actually goes and fetches another pine cone! Actually knows where to find a pine cone! And comes and gives it in my hand!
Do you want it? I ask then, do you want the tinderbox? The little hand appears, and takes it out of my hand, careful not to touch me,