Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [246]
Half past eight
Sat on the stoep for a long time, tried to think of everything that happened there in Agaat’s little back room tonight. It’s as if I’m too scared to write it down. As if writing would efface the fragile event, as if words would spoil everything.
It smelt sweet there with her in the little bed. Agaat’s breath, her little body smell sweet nowadays. All the sores and ringworms have healed, the bad teeth have been pulled, she eats well and sleeps well, has regular bowel movements, has a bath every evening. Not at all as hunched up and bewildered as at first. Sweet, like a little rabbit. And then there was also the twig of fennel that she’d picked this afternoon that I’d put in a little jar next to her bed. I picked a leaf and crushed it between my fingers and smelt it and made her smell it too. Dreamy the little eyes were in mine, they half closed from the aroma. If she were to say something, I thought to myself, it would be because she was almost asleep.
I wanted to press her to me. But that’s against the rules.
Twenty to nine
And then!
My hand trembles to write it.
Then I bent down and whispered in her ear.
What did I say to her?
Ten to nine
I’m so hungry, I’m so thirsty, I said, because you don’t want to talk to me and I know you can talk, because I hear you, through the hole in the door, how you talk to yourself in bed and I see your lips move and I wonder what you’re saying.
I knelt by the bedside.
Perhaps you can say your new name for me?
I blinked with my eyes to ask, big please!
Twenty past nine
Why is it taking me so long to write it up? I’d rather just think about it again and again. It’s too precious! It’s too fine! Words spoil it. Who could understand?
I held my ear right next to her mouth, a good ten minutes long I breathed in her little fennel breath.
I imagined the tip of her will as the rolled-up tip of a fern. Did I say it out loud? That she should also imagine it? A tender green ringlet with little folded-in fingers?
I bent it open with my attention.
Then it came into my ear, like the rushing of my own blood, against the deep end of the roof of her mouth, a gentle guttural-fricative, the sound of a shell against my ear, the g-g-g of Agaat.
I felt faint, lowered my head on her chest.
Fast asleep she was when I lifted my head. I must have slumbered off myself. Had I dreamt it all?
When I got up, she opened her eyes. I opened my mouth to say her name.
Then she also opened her mouth.
Then we said her name at the same time. Sweet, full in my mouth, like a mouthful of something heavenly. Lord my God, the child You have given me.
Ten o’clock
Still I have the feeling of satiety. Now still as I’m writing here, hour upon hour, I feel it, a tingling fulfilled feeling through my whole body, as I imagine it must feel to suckle a child. Can it be that you feed someone else and feel replete yourself with it?
Perhaps it’s the mere fact that she could go to sleep with me so close to her that makes me feel like this.
It’s the first time in my life that I understand it like this, the impersonal unity of all living things. It doesn’t matter who is who. The speaker and the listener. The shell and the sea, the mother cat and the human hand that stirs her blind litter, the wind and the soughing pine, the dry drift and the flood. It’s one energy. We are one, Agaat and I, I feel it stir in my navel.
17 March 1954
Agaat spoke to me again! Admittedly through a closed door, but still! First we played the knock-knock rhyme, on either side of the door, I say the words and she knocks the rhythm.
She looks for her man
and she looks for her child
her patience is thin
and her eyes are wild
she knock-knocks!
she knock-knocks!
knock-knock!
knock-knock!
By the second verse I hear another voice beneath mine.
She knocks with her body
To know if she can